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Following my time with in excess of 200 new releases this year, I am officially closing the book on 2025. My year-end list is live, and I feel content with the concluding selections, even knowing a host of fantastic releases probably slipped by the wayside. Now, there's plan is to except relax, take a short break, and possibly go for a nice walk in the— ah crap, discovered one more amazing experience. And just like that, goodbye to my plans!

An Early Contender Emerges

During my laid-back sessions, usually reserved for a handful of quirky titles, I've come across what could be my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual roguelike for Windows PC that deconstructs a classic labyrinth explorer into a probability-fueled game of high stakes risk and reward. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride being aware of a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your wallet for unique titles.

A Strategic Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's different from everything I'm familiar with. The concept is that you need to explore a dungeon, going down level by level on a quest for the sun, which has vanished from the fantasy world. Mechanically, this creates some standard crawl progression. Pick a hero who has stats and abilities, fight through each level of enemies, pick up some passive buffs (in the form of teeth), and defeat a few stage-ending champions. Easy to grasp!

The Distinctive Gameplay Loop

How you effectively complete a dungeon room, though. Every time you begin a fresh level, you're shown a sixteen-square board of boxes. All spaces features a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To explore a room, you choose on one of the horizontal lines, but the specific tile you select is up to chance.

You might see a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You begin with a quarter likelihood of selecting a particular space in a row.

Subsequently, your chances are recalculated. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you choose on a different row first and try to make more cautious selections early? Herein lies the push-your-luck gameplay on display in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing after you develop its rhythm.

Manipulating Probability

The procedural hook is that your odds can be manipulated over the course of a session by collecting teeth that alter which objects you're drawn toward. For example, you could acquire a perk that will reduce the probability of hitting a trap, but will also decrease the odds of getting a reward too.

• Crafting a loadout is about influencing the statistics as best you can to have a improved likelihood at selecting the optimal square.
• On a particular session, I invested my power boosts toward brute force and chose every teeth possible that would boost my chances of attracting me toward monsters aligned with that strength.
• In another run, I constructed my hero around loot caches and paired that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes whenever I claimed a reward.

The customization choices are somewhat constrained, but they are sufficient to experiment with to allow you to tweak numbers according to your strategy.

An Ever-Present Tension

Of course, it's still a game of chance. There remains the chance that you have a high probability to hit the square you want but wind up hitting a foe that would take out your last bit of health. Every move is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you navigate a level and decide when to keep clicking or when to move on to the subsequent stage instead of pushing your luck.

Consumables including enemy-killing bombs aid in reducing the chance, as do some special skills. An adventurer's signature move, activated once selecting four tiles, lets gamers to click on a vertical line rather than a row on a turn. If you play this strategically, you can save that move for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. There's a shocking level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has at least one more update to go before the full version is released. An additional hero and a additional end-level foe are expected to drop sometime in January. The 1.0 release likely won't be far behind, but the studio haven't committed to a final date yet.

A Parting Recommendation

No matter when the complete game arrives, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I have been thoroughly captivated with it, discovering its little secrets and saving my accumulated currency every session to unlock a steady stream of meta progression rewards, including fresh adventurers and items I can buy while playing. I still haven't found the deepest level, and I have a sense I'll continue working on that task when the full version launches. Count me in for the long haul.