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After playing more than 200 fresh titles this year, It's time to turning the page on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I'm satisfied with the final results, accepting that plenty of stellar titles may have dropped through the cracks. At this point, it's plan is to but sit back, take a short break, and maybe enjoy a refreshing hike in the— ah crap, stumbled upon a brilliant title. And just like that, goodbye to my intentions!

A Surprising Front-Runner Appears

In my more off-hours play, usually reserved for a selection of unusual games, I've come across what might become my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a traditional dungeon crawler into a probability-fueled game of significant risk peril and prize. View this a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your wallet for unique titles.

A Calculated Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's a departure from all I've previously experienced. The setup is that you need to explore a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has vanished from this mythical realm. Mechanically, this results in some standard crawl progression. Pick a hero possessing unique attributes and skills, defeat enemies on every stage of foes, pick up some permanent upgrades (in the form of teeth), and vanquish a few area guardians. Simple enough!

The Novel Core Mechanic

The way you effectively complete a dungeon room, however. Whenever you begin a fresh level, you're shown a sixteen-square board of boxes. Each square holds a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To make a move, you choose on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you select is determined by luck.

You could encounter a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You start with a 25% chance of landing on any given square in a row.

Subsequently, your odds shift. The question becomes: Do you take the risk, or do you click on a different row first and aim for safer moves early? Herein lies the push-your-luck gameplay in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get an understanding of it.

Shaping the Odds

The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped during an attempt by picking up teeth that alter which objects you're more attracted to. To illustrate, you may obtain a perk that will decrease your odds of encountering a trap, but will also decrease the odds of getting a treasure chest too.

• Crafting a loadout is about manipulating math as best you can to have a improved likelihood at getting your desired outcome.
• During one attempt, I invested my power boosts toward physical attack/defense and selected all the teeth possible that would increase my odds of being drawn to monsters with that damage type.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and paired that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies whenever I secured loot.

The customization choices are limited, but it provides ample to experiment with to enable you to influence numbers the way you want.

A Constant Gamble

Naturally, it's still a game of chance. There remains the chance that you have a likely outcome to hit the desired tile but wind up hitting a monster that would eliminate your remaining life. Every move is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you clear a floor out and decide when to continue selecting or when to move on to the subsequent stage instead of pushing your luck.

Items like enemy-killing bombs aid in reducing the chance, similar to some character abilities. One hero's special power, powered up by selecting four tiles, allows players to click on a vertical line in place of a horizontal row on a turn. By employing this strategically, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to sidestep a dangerous choice. There's a shocking level of strategy in the basic action of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has another update scheduled before the complete edition is released. Another playable adventurer and a additional end-level foe are scheduled to arrive by the end of January. The 1.0 release probably isn't long after, but the creators haven't set a concrete launch day yet.

A Final Thought

Whenever its 1.0 launch occurs, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I have been thoroughly captivated with it, finding all of small details and storing my run rewards every session to reveal a continuous trickle of persistent upgrades, featuring fresh adventurers and items available for acquisition while playing. As of now, I am yet to found the deepest level, and I suspect I'll continue attempting that goal when 1.0 finally hits. Count me in for the complete journey.