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Following my time with in excess of 200 new releases this year, I am officially closing the book on 2025. My year-end list is out in the world, and I feel content with the ultimate rankings, accepting that numerous stellar titles likely fell by the wayside. At this point, it's nothing for me to do except relax, unplug a little, and perhaps take a refreshing hike in the— ah crap, stumbled upon a amazing experience. So much for my plans!

A Premature Front-Runner Appears

With my off-hours play, typically earmarked for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across potentially my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a classic dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of major consequence danger and payoff. View this a preview for the in-the-know: If you relish discovering a game before it's cool, give Sol Cesto a try so you can make a dent in your gaming budget.

A Calculated Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's unlike anything I've ever played. The premise is that you need to explore a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has gone missing from this mythical realm. In practice, this creates some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer who has stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of foes, collect some stat improvements (which are teeth), and defeat a few stage-ending champions. Simple enough!

The Unique Central System

The method by which you effectively complete a dungeon room, however. Every time you begin a fresh level, the game presents a sixteen-square board of boxes. All spaces holds a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To explore a room, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but which square you land in is a matter of probability.

You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You start with a one-in-four probability of selecting a specific tile in a row.

After that, the probabilities change. So do you go for it, or do you choose on a different row first and attempt some safer moves early? This is the push-your-luck gameplay at play in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing when you acquire a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The roguelike twist is that your odds can be manipulated over the course of a session by collecting teeth that modify the types of squares you're more likely to land on. For example, you could acquire a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of finding a reward too.

• Creating a build is about influencing the statistics optimally to have a higher chance at selecting the optimal square.
• On a particular session, I invested my stat upgrades toward melee prowess and selected all the teeth I could that would increase my odds of landing on monsters of that variety.
• On a different attempt, I built my character around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would debuff nearby foes whenever I secured loot.

The customization choices are not endless, but there's enough to work with to allow you to tweak numbers according to your strategy.

A Persistent Gamble

Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have an 80% chance to select the square you want but ultimately choose a foe that would eliminate your final hit point. Each click is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you navigate a level and determine if to press onward or to proceed to the subsequent stage rather than risking it all.

Items like explosive devices aid in reducing the chance, just like some hero powers. One hero's special power, activated once making four moves, lets gamers to click on a column instead of a horizontal line during that action. If you play your cards right, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. It's a surprising degree of depth in the basic action of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has another update scheduled before the final game is unleashed. An additional hero and a new boss are expected to drop sometime in January. The full launch likely won't be far behind, but the game's developers haven't announced a concrete launch day yet.

A Final Endorsement

No matter when its 1.0 launch occurs, you ought to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I have been completely engrossed with it, discovering its little secrets and saving my accumulated currency per attempt to unlock a steady stream of persistent upgrades, including additional heroes and items available for acquisition while playing. As of now, I am yet to completed the dungeon, and I suspect I'll still be pursuing that objective when the official release drops. I'm committed for the entire experience.