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Following my time with well over 200 fresh titles this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My annual roundup is out in the world, and I'm satisfied with the ultimate rankings, accepting that a host of excellent games probably slipped through the cracks. Now, there's plan is to but sit back, unplug a little, and possibly go for a nice walk in the— well, shoot, found another brilliant title. There go my intentions!

A Premature Favorite Surfaces

In my more off-hours play, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've encountered what might become my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that breaks down a conventional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of high stakes danger and payoff. Take this as a preview for the in-the-know: If you relish in knowing about a game before it's popular, sample Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your gaming budget.

A Tactical Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's different from everything I've ever played. The concept is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has disappeared from its world. In practice, this creates some standard crawl progression. Select a character who has stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of enemies, collect some stat improvements (which are teeth), and defeat a few area guardians. Straightforward, right!

The Unique Central System

The method by which you actually clear a area, however. Every time you enter a new floor, you're shown a 4x4 grid of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To explore a room, you choose on one of the four rows, but the exact space you end up on is determined by luck.

You could encounter a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a quarter likelihood of hitting a specific tile in a row.

Subsequently, your probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you take the risk, or do you choose on a different row first and try to make safer moves early? That's the risk-reward dynamic in action in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get an understanding of it.

Shaping the Odds

The roguelike twist is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by collecting teeth that alter which objects you're more attracted to. For example, you could acquire a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Creating a build is about influencing the statistics to the utmost to have a higher chance at landing where you want.
• During one attempt, I put all my attribute improvements toward melee prowess and selected all the teeth I could that would improve my probability of being drawn to monsters of that variety.
• During a separate session, I constructed my hero around reward boxes and paired that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters each time I claimed a reward.

The strategic possibilities are not endless, but it provides ample to work with to allow you to tweak the odds to your preference.

A Constant Risk

Naturally, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There's always the possibility that you have a likely outcome to hit the square you want but wind up hitting a monster that would deplete your remaining life. Every move is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you clear a floor out and decide when to keep clicking or to proceed to the subsequent stage instead of risking it all.

Tools such as enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, as do some character abilities. One hero's special power, activated once clearing four squares, lets gamers to click on a column rather than a horizontal row during that action. If you play this strategically, you can hold that ability for a crucial point 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 development, and it has another update scheduled before the complete edition is unleashed. Another playable adventurer and a new boss are planned for release by the end of January. The full launch may not be far behind, but the studio haven't set a final date yet.

A Parting Recommendation

Regardless of when its 1.0 launch occurs, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your radar. For the past week, I've been positively obsessed with it, discovering its small details and saving my accumulated currency every session to unlock a steady stream of meta progression rewards, featuring new characters and items available for acquisition during a run. As of now, I am yet to reached the bottom, and I have a sense I will remain working on that task when the full version launches. Count me in for the long haul.