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After playing in excess of 200 recent games this year, I'm formally closing the book on 2025. My annual roundup is published, and I am at peace with the concluding selections, despite being aware numerous excellent games may have dropped under the radar. Now, there's job is to but sit back, disconnect briefly, and possibly go for a refreshing hike in the— oh no, discovered one more brilliant title. So much for my peaceful respite!

A Premature Favorite Surfaces

With my laid-back sessions, usually reserved for a selection of unusual games, I've encountered potentially my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that deconstructs a traditional labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of significant risk risk and reward. View this a preview for the in-the-know: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it's cool, sample Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your gaming budget.

A Strategic Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's a departure from all I'm familiar with. The premise is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper to find the sun, which has disappeared from the fantasy world. In practice, that makes for some familiar roguelike structure. Pick a hero who has parameters and powers, clear floor after floor of enemies, collect some passive buffs (which are teeth), and defeat a few stage-ending champions. Straightforward, right!

The Distinctive Central System

The way you actually clear a dungeon room, though. Each instance you start another stage, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To proceed, you choose on one of the four rows, but which square you select is determined by luck.

You might see a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a quarter likelihood of selecting a particular space in a row.

Subsequently, your odds shift. So do you press your luck, or do you choose on a alternative option first and attempt some less risky choices early? This is the tension between chance and safety on display in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get a feel for it.

Manipulating Probability

The meta-layer is that your odds can be manipulated through a run by collecting teeth that modify the types of squares you're drawn toward. To illustrate, you may obtain a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Creating a build is about tweaking the numbers optimally to have a better shot at landing where you want.
• During one attempt, I invested my attribute improvements toward brute force and selected all the teeth possible that would increase my odds of attracting me toward monsters of that variety.
• During a separate session, I built my character around treasure chests and paired that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies every time I claimed a reward.

The build options are limited, but there's enough to engage with to enable you to influence probabilities to your preference.

An Ever-Present Gamble

Unsurprisingly, it remains a game of chance. There remains the risk that you have an 80% chance to select the preferred space but end up landing on an enemy that would eliminate your last bit of health. Every move is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you clear a floor out and determine if to keep clicking or to proceed to the following level rather than pushing your luck.

Consumables including enemy-killing bombs aid in reducing the chance, just like some character abilities. An adventurer's special power, powered up by making four moves, enables you to select a vertical line instead of a horizontal row during that action. By employing your cards right, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to sidestep a dangerous choice. There's a shocking amount of nuance in the simple act of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has at least one more update to go until the complete edition is launched. A new character and a additional end-level foe are expected to drop by the end of January. The full launch likely won't be far behind, but the game's developers haven't announced a final date yet.

A Final Recommendation

Whenever it's fully released, you might want to put Sol Cesto in your sights. For the past week, I've been completely engrossed with it, uncovering each of small details and saving my accumulated currency in each run to unlock a steady stream of permanent unlocks, featuring fresh adventurers and items purchasable while playing. As of now, I am yet to reached the bottom, and I have a sense I'll continue pursuing that objective when 1.0 finally hits. I'm committed for the entire experience.