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After playing more than 200 new releases this year, It's time to closing the book on 2025. My best-of compilation is published, and I am at peace with the concluding selections, even knowing a host of fantastic releases may have dropped by the wayside. Currently, my only job is to other than unwind, unplug a little, and possibly go for a refreshing hike in the— ah crap, stumbled upon a great game. And just like that, goodbye to my intentions!

An Early Favorite Surfaces

During my off-hours play, typically earmarked for a handful of quirky titles, I've discovered potentially my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that breaks down a classic dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of significant risk peril and prize. View this an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it hits the mainstream, sample Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your gaming budget.

A Calculated Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's different from everything I'm familiar with. The concept is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has vanished from this mythical realm. In practice, this creates some standard crawl progression. Select a character possessing unique stats and abilities, clear floor after floor of foes, collect some stat improvements (in the form of teeth), and vanquish a few area guardians. Straightforward, right!

The Unique Central System

The way you truly navigate a chamber, however. Whenever you begin a fresh level, the game presents a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To proceed, you just select on one of the four rows, but the specific tile you land in is up to chance.

You may face a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You initially will have a 25% chance of selecting any given square in a row.

After that, the probabilities change. So do you go for it, or do you click on a alternative option first and aim for less risky choices early? Herein lies the risk-reward dynamic at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get a feel for it.

Shaping the Odds

The meta-layer is that your odds can be manipulated during an attempt by gathering teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. For example, you may obtain a perk that will lower your chances of hitting a trap, but will also decrease the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Creating a build is about influencing the statistics as best you can to have a improved likelihood at getting your desired outcome.
• On a particular session, I invested my stat upgrades toward brute force and chose every teeth I could that would increase my odds of landing on monsters of that variety.
• In another run, I built my character around treasure chests and combined that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes whenever I secured loot.

The strategic possibilities are limited, but they are sufficient to work with to allow you to tweak numbers to your preference.

An Ever-Present Gamble

Naturally, it remains a game of chance. There remains the possibility that you have a high probability to land on the square you want but end up landing a foe that would take out your final hit point. All selections is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you clear a floor out and choose whether to continue selecting or to advance to the next floor instead of pushing your luck.

Items like explosive devices help cut down the chance, just like some hero powers. An adventurer's special power, charged after making four moves, allows players to choose a vertical column instead of a row during that action. Should you use this move wisely, you can hold that ability for an optimal time to sidestep a dangerous choice. There's a shocking level of strategy in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is currently in its preview phase, and it has a final update to go until the full version is unleashed. Another playable adventurer and a additional end-level foe are scheduled to arrive sometime in January. The full launch likely won't be long after, but the game's developers haven't announced a concrete launch day yet.

A Parting Endorsement

Regardless of when the complete game arrives, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. For the past week, I've been positively obsessed with it, finding all of small details and saving my accumulated currency in each run to unlock a steady stream of persistent upgrades, featuring additional heroes and items available for acquisition during a run. I still haven't completed the dungeon, and I suspect I will remain working on that task when the official release drops. Count me in for the entire experience.