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After playing in excess of 200 recent games this year, I'm formally closing the book on 2025. My year-end list is published, and I am at peace with the ultimate rankings, accepting that numerous excellent games probably slipped by the wayside. At this point, it's plan is to but sit back, take a short break, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— oh no, found another great game. And just like that, goodbye to my peaceful respite!

A Premature Front-Runner Appears

With my laid-back sessions, typically earmarked for a selection of unusual games, I've discovered potentially my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a traditional dungeon crawler into a probability-fueled game of significant risk danger and payoff. Take this as a preview for the in-the-know: If you relish in knowing about a game before it hits the mainstream, sample Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your wallet for unique titles.

A Calculated Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's different from everything I'm familiar with. The setup is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper in search of the sun, which has vanished from its world. In practice, this results in some familiar roguelike structure. Choose an adventurer with their own attributes and skills, defeat enemies on every stage of foes, collect some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and vanquish a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

How you effectively complete a area, is unique. Each instance you begin a fresh level, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Every tile holds a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To proceed, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you land in 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 hitting a specific tile in a row.

After that, the odds shift. So do you go for it, or do you choose on a different row first and attempt some safer moves early? That's the tension between chance and safety on display in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The procedural hook is that your probabilities can be influenced over the course of a session by gathering 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 encountering a trap, but will also decrease the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about influencing the statistics as best you can to have a better shot at landing where you want.
• During one attempt, I put all my attribute improvements toward brute force and selected all the teeth I could that would boost my chances of attracting me toward monsters of that variety.
• During a separate session, I built my character around reward boxes and paired that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters every time I secured loot.

The strategic possibilities are not endless, but there's enough to experiment with to enable you to influence probabilities according to your strategy.

An Ever-Present Gamble

Naturally, it's still a game of chance. You constantly face the risk that you have a likely outcome to hit the square you want but end up landing a foe that would take out your last bit of health. All selections is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you work through a stage and choose whether to keep clicking or to proceed to the subsequent stage rather than testing fate.

Items like enemy-killing bombs aid in reducing the chance, similar to some character abilities. An adventurer's signature move, charged after making four moves, enables you to click on a vertical column in place of a horizontal row for that move. By employing your cards right, you can save that move for a crucial point to sidestep a dangerous choice. You'll find an astonishing amount of nuance in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is remaining in its preview phase, and it has another update planned before the complete edition is released. A new character and a fresh guardian are planned for release by the end of January. The full launch may not be long after, but the game's developers haven't committed to a concrete launch day yet.

A Parting Endorsement

No matter when its 1.0 launch occurs, you might want to put Sol Cesto in your sights. For the past week, I've been positively obsessed with it, uncovering each of small details and banking my earned gold in each run to access a constant flow of persistent upgrades, featuring fresh adventurers and items purchasable mid-attempt. As of now, I am yet to completed the dungeon, and I get the feeling I will remain attempting that goal when the official release drops. Sign me up for the entire experience.