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After playing in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, I'm formally wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I am at peace with the final results, despite being aware numerous stellar titles likely fell by the wayside. At this point, it's nothing for me to do but sit back, unplug a little, and perhaps take a refreshing hike in the— oh no, found another brilliant title. And just like that, goodbye to my plans!

A Premature Front-Runner Appears

With my laid-back sessions, usually reserved for a selection of unusual games, I've come across potentially my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a traditional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of major consequence danger and payoff. View this a preview for the in-the-know: If you enjoy discovering a game before it hits the mainstream, sample Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your indie credit card.

A Calculated Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's different from everything I've ever played. The setup is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper to find the sun, which has vanished from the fantasy world. In practice, this results in some familiar roguelike structure. Select a character with their own stats and abilities, clear floor after floor of monsters, acquire some permanent upgrades (represented as teeth), and vanquish a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

The way you actually clear a dungeon room, though. Each instance you begin a fresh level, you see a sixteen-square board of boxes. All spaces features a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To explore a room, you choose on one of the horizontal lines, but which square 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 begin with a one-in-four probability of landing on any given square in a row.

Subsequently, your probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you opt on a different row first and try to make safer moves early? This is the push-your-luck gameplay in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing when you acquire a feel for it.

Shaping the Odds

The roguelike twist is that your odds can be manipulated over the course of a session by gathering teeth that change what things you're drawn toward. To illustrate, you could acquire a perk that will decrease your odds of encountering a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of getting a reward too.

• Crafting a loadout is about tweaking the numbers optimally to have a higher chance at selecting the optimal square.
• During one attempt, I put all my power boosts toward brute force and selected all the teeth possible that would increase my odds of attracting me toward monsters of that variety.
• In another run, I built my character around loot caches and paired that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies whenever I secured loot.

The customization choices are not endless, but they are sufficient to work with to allow you to tweak the odds the way you want.

A Constant Tension

Naturally, it remains a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have a likely outcome to land on the square you want but wind up hitting a monster that would eliminate your last bit of health. Every move is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you navigate a level and determine if to keep clicking or to proceed to the subsequent stage as opposed to pushing your luck.

Items like destructive ordnance assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some character abilities. A particular character's special power, activated once selecting four tiles, enables you to select a vertical line rather than a horizontal row for that move. If you play this move wisely, you can save that move for a crucial point to sidestep a dangerous choice. It's a surprising amount of nuance in the basic action of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has a final update planned before the full version is released. An additional hero and a new boss are planned for release sometime in January. The official version may not be much later, but the studio haven't set a concrete launch day yet.

A Final Endorsement

No matter when the complete game arrives, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. For the past week, I've been completely engrossed with it, discovering its hidden nuances and saving my accumulated currency every session to access a constant flow of persistent upgrades, featuring new characters and items available for acquisition while playing. As of now, I am yet to reached the bottom, and I suspect I'll still be working on that task when the official release drops. Sign me up for the long haul.