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Having experienced well over 200 new releases this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My year-end list is live, and I am at peace with the ultimate rankings, despite being aware plenty of excellent games may have dropped through the cracks. At this point, it's nothing for me to do but sit back, take a short break, and perhaps take a nice walk in the— ah crap, stumbled upon a amazing experience. There go my intentions!

A Surprising Front-Runner Appears

During my casual gaming time, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across what might become my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual roguelike for Windows PC that breaks down a conventional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of high stakes risk and reward. Consider this an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride being aware of a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your gaming budget.

A Tactical Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's different from everything I've previously experienced. The concept is that you need to explore a dungeon, going down level by level on a quest for the sun, which has vanished from its world. Mechanically, this results in some standard crawl progression. Select a character who has parameters and powers, fight through each level of enemies, acquire some passive buffs (represented as teeth), and overcome a few stage-ending champions. Straightforward, right!

The Distinctive Central System

The way you effectively complete a chamber, though. Each instance you start another stage, you're shown a sixteen-square board of boxes. Each square holds a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To proceed, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but which square 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 hitting a specific tile in a row.

After that, the chances are recalculated. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you click on a different row first and attempt some more cautious selections early? This is the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing when you acquire its rhythm.

Shaping the Odds

The roguelike twist is that your probabilities can be influenced through a run by gathering teeth that change what things you're drawn toward. For example, you might get a perk that will reduce the probability of landing on a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Creating a build is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a improved likelihood at selecting the optimal square.
• In one run, I put all my power boosts toward brute force and selected all the teeth I could that would improve my probability of being drawn to monsters aligned with that strength.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies each time I claimed a reward.

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

A Persistent Gamble

Naturally, it remains a game of chance. There's always the risk that you have a high probability to select the preferred space but wind up hitting a monster that would eliminate your remaining life. Every move is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you navigate a level and decide when to continue selecting or to advance to the next floor rather than testing fate.

Items like destructive ordnance aid in reducing the chance, as do some hero powers. A particular character's unique ability, activated once clearing four squares, enables you to select a column rather than a horizontal row for that move. If you play this strategically, you can save that move for an optimal time to avoid a risky decision. There's a shocking amount of nuance in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has another update planned before the complete edition is launched. A new character and a additional end-level foe are scheduled to arrive sometime in January. The official version probably isn't much later, but the studio haven't announced a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Endorsement

Regardless of when it's fully released, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I've been positively obsessed with it, finding all of hidden nuances and saving my accumulated currency per attempt to access a constant flow of persistent upgrades, including fresh adventurers and items purchasable while playing. To this day, I have not completed the dungeon, and I suspect I'll continue working on that task when the official release drops. I'm committed for the long haul.