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Following my time with more than 200 new releases this year, I'm formally closing the book on 2025. My best-of compilation is published, and I am at peace with the ultimate rankings, accepting that plenty of fantastic releases likely fell through the cracks. Currently, my only nothing for me to do but sit back, take a short break, and maybe enjoy a pleasant stroll in the— well, shoot, discovered one more great game. There go my peaceful respite!

A Surprising Front-Runner Appears

In my more laid-back sessions, often set aside for a selection of unusual games, I've encountered what could be my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual roguelike for Windows PC that deconstructs a conventional dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of high stakes risk and reward. View this an early adopter's heads-up: If you relish discovering a game before it's cool, give Sol Cesto a try so you can burn a spot in your gaming budget.

A Calculated Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's different from everything I've previously experienced. The setup is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, going down level by level on a quest for the sun, which has gone missing from its world. In practice, this results in some recognizable genre framework. Choose an adventurer with their own parameters and powers, fight through each level of monsters, collect some passive buffs (in the form of teeth), and vanquish a few stage-ending champions. Simple enough!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

The method by which you effectively complete a area, though. Each instance you enter a new floor, the game presents a 4x4 grid of boxes. All spaces features a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To explore a room, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you select is a matter of probability.

You could encounter a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You begin with a quarter likelihood of selecting a particular space in a row.

After that, the odds shift. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you choose on a alternative option first and try to make safer moves early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing after you develop its rhythm.

Shaping the Odds

The meta-layer is that your odds can be manipulated through a run by picking up teeth that modify the types of squares 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 concurrently lower the odds of getting a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a improved likelihood at selecting the optimal square.
• On a particular session, I invested my stat upgrades toward melee prowess and selected all the teeth I could that would improve my probability of landing on monsters aligned with that strength.
• On a different attempt, I built my character around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies every time I opened a chest.

The strategic possibilities are somewhat constrained, but they are sufficient to engage with to allow you to tweak the odds according to your strategy.

An Ever-Present Tension

Naturally, it's still a game of chance. There remains the chance that you have an 80% chance to select the desired tile but wind up hitting on an enemy that would take out your last bit of health. Each click is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you navigate a level and choose whether to continue selecting or to advance to the subsequent stage instead of risking it all.

Items like enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, just like some character abilities. A particular character's unique ability, activated once making four moves, enables you to choose a column in place of a horizontal row for that move. Should you use your cards right, you can save that move for a crucial point to avoid a risky decision. You'll find an astonishing amount of nuance in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is remaining in its preview phase, and it has a final update planned before the full version is launched. Another playable adventurer and a fresh guardian are scheduled to arrive before the conclusion of January. The 1.0 release may not be far behind, but the creators haven't set a concrete launch day yet.

A Parting Endorsement

Whenever the complete game arrives, you might want to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I have been thoroughly captivated with it, discovering its little secrets and banking my earned gold in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of permanent unlocks, such as new characters and items available for acquisition while playing. I still haven't found the deepest level, and I have a sense I'll continue attempting that goal when the full version launches. Sign me up for the long haul.