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Having experienced more than 200 recent games this year, I'm formally turning the page on 2025. My annual roundup is published, and I feel content with the final results, despite being aware a host of fantastic releases probably slipped through the cracks. At this point, it's plan is to other than unwind, take a short break, and maybe enjoy a refreshing hike in the— ah crap, stumbled upon a great game. So much for my peaceful respite!

An Early Front-Runner Appears

With my off-hours play, typically earmarked for a few oddball curiosities, I've encountered what might become my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that breaks down a classic labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of significant risk danger and payoff. View this a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it hits the mainstream, give Sol Cesto a try so you can punch a hole in your wallet for unique titles.

A Calculated Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's unlike anything I'm familiar with. The setup is that you need to explore a dungeon, descending floor after floor in search of the sun, which has vanished from the fantasy world. When you play, this creates some familiar roguelike structure. Choose an adventurer with their own parameters and powers, defeat enemies on every stage of enemies, collect some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and vanquish a few area guardians. Easy to grasp!

The Unique Core Mechanic

How you actually clear a dungeon room, is unique. Each instance you begin a fresh level, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square features a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To explore a room, you just select on one of the four rows, but which square you end up on is a matter of probability.

You might see a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You begin with a one-in-four probability of landing on any given square in a row.

Then, you'll probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you click on a safer line first and try to make more cautious selections early? This is the push-your-luck gameplay in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The meta-layer is that your odds can be manipulated over the course of a session by picking up teeth that alter which objects you're drawn toward. To illustrate, you might get a perk that will lower your chances of hitting a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about influencing the statistics optimally to have a improved likelihood at landing where you want.
• During one attempt, I put all my power boosts toward physical attack/defense and chose every teeth I could that would increase my odds of being drawn to monsters of that variety.
• In another run, I built my character around treasure chests and paired that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes whenever I opened a chest.

The customization choices are limited, but they are sufficient to engage with to enable you to influence probabilities the way you want.

A Constant Risk

Of course, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There remains the possibility that you have an 80% chance to hit the preferred space but ultimately choose a foe that would eliminate your last bit of health. Each click is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you work through a stage and choose whether to keep clicking or when to move on to the following level instead of testing fate.

Items like enemy-killing bombs help cut down the chance, as do some special skills. An adventurer's special power, powered up by clearing four squares, lets gamers to click on a vertical line rather than a horizontal row for that move. Should you use this strategically, you can hold that ability for an optimal time to sidestep a dangerous choice. It's a surprising amount of nuance in the basic action of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is remaining in early access, and it has a final update to go until the full version is unleashed. An additional hero and a new boss are scheduled to arrive before the conclusion of January. The 1.0 release likely won't be much later, but the game's developers haven't committed to a concrete launch day yet.

A Parting Thought

Regardless of when it's fully released, you might want to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I've been completely engrossed with it, discovering its hidden nuances and saving my accumulated currency in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of meta progression rewards, featuring additional heroes and items available for acquisition while playing. As of now, I am yet to completed the dungeon, and I get the feeling I'll still be working on that task when the official release drops. Count me in for the complete journey.