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Having experienced in excess of 200 recent games this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I feel content with the final results, accepting that a host of fantastic releases probably slipped through the cracks. Now, there's plan is to but sit back, unplug a little, and maybe enjoy a pleasant stroll in the— well, shoot, discovered one more great game. And just like that, goodbye to my plans!

An Early Favorite Surfaces

In my more laid-back sessions, typically earmarked for a handful of quirky titles, I've come across potentially my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual roguelike for Windows PC that deconstructs a classic dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of significant risk risk and reward. Consider this a preview for the in-the-know: If you enjoy in knowing about a game before it's cool, sample Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

A Tactical Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's different from everything I'm familiar with. The setup is that you must venture into a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has gone missing from the fantasy world. Mechanically, this results in some standard crawl progression. Select a character who has attributes and skills, defeat enemies on every stage of enemies, acquire some permanent upgrades (in the form of teeth), and defeat a few biome bosses. Straightforward, right!

The Unique Central System

The way you effectively complete a dungeon room, though. Every time you begin a fresh level, you see a 4x4 grid of boxes. Every tile either contains a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To explore a room, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you end up on is up to chance.

You could encounter a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You start with a 25% chance of selecting any given square in a row.

After that, the odds shift. So do you go for it, or do you choose on a safer line first and attempt some safer moves early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing after you develop a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The roguelike twist is that your odds can be manipulated during an attempt by collecting teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you may obtain a perk that will reduce the probability of hitting a trap, but will also decrease the odds of finding a reward too.

• Creating a build is about influencing the statistics optimally to have a higher chance at landing where you want.
• On a particular session, I invested my stat upgrades toward brute force and chose every teeth I could that would boost my chances of attracting me toward monsters of that variety.
• In another run, I constructed my hero around treasure chests and paired that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters whenever I secured loot.

The build options are somewhat constrained, but they are sufficient to engage with to enable you to influence the odds the way you want.

An Ever-Present Tension

Unsurprisingly, it's still a game of chance. You constantly face the risk that you have a high probability to select the desired tile but end up landing on an enemy that would take out your last bit of health. Each click is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you work through a stage and decide when to continue selecting or when to move on to the subsequent stage rather than risking it all.

Items like destructive ordnance help cut down the chance, just like some hero powers. A particular character's unique ability, charged after selecting four tiles, allows players to click on a vertical line instead of a row during that action. By employing this move wisely, you can save that move for an optimal time to sidestep a dangerous choice. It's a surprising degree of depth in the basic action of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is remaining in development, and it has another update planned before the full version is released. An additional hero and a additional end-level foe are planned for release before the conclusion of January. The official version may not be far behind, but the game's developers haven't set a specific release window yet.

A Final Endorsement

No matter when its 1.0 launch occurs, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your radar. For the past week, I've been positively obsessed with it, finding all of little secrets and saving my accumulated currency per attempt to unlock a steady stream of meta progression rewards, including new characters and items available for acquisition mid-attempt. I still haven't found the deepest level, and I suspect I will remain attempting that goal when the full version launches. Sign me up for the complete journey.