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Having experienced more than 200 new releases this year, I am officially wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is published, and I'm satisfied with the ultimate rankings, even knowing plenty of excellent games probably slipped under the radar. Now, there's job is to except relax, unplug a little, and maybe enjoy a refreshing hike in the— oh no, discovered one more brilliant title. There go my plans!

An Early Contender Emerges

With my casual gaming time, often set aside for a handful of quirky titles, I've come across what might become my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a classic labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of significant risk danger and payoff. View this an early adopter's heads-up: If you enjoy discovering a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

A Calculated Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's unlike anything I've previously experienced. The concept is that you need to explore a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper to find the sun, which has disappeared from the fantasy world. In practice, that makes for some familiar roguelike structure. Choose an adventurer with their own parameters and powers, clear floor after floor of foes, pick up some passive buffs (represented as teeth), and overcome a few stage-ending champions. Straightforward, right!

The Distinctive Central System

The method by which you truly navigate a dungeon room, however. Each instance you start another stage, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square either contains 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 which square you land in is up to chance.

You may face a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a 25% chance of hitting a particular space in a row.

After that, the odds shift. So do you take the risk, or do you opt on a alternative option first and try to make more cautious selections early? That's the push-your-luck gameplay on display in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing when you acquire its rhythm.

Influencing Chance

The roguelike twist is that your percentages can be shaped through a run by collecting teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you might get a perk that will lower your chances of encountering a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Crafting a loadout is about manipulating math as best you can to have a better shot at landing where you want.
• In one run, I invested my attribute improvements toward brute force and chose every teeth possible that would increase my odds of attracting me toward monsters aligned with that strength.
• On a different attempt, I constructed my hero around treasure chests and coupled it with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies each time I claimed a reward.

The strategic possibilities are limited, but there's enough to experiment with to enable you to influence probabilities the way you want.

An Ever-Present Tension

Unsurprisingly, it remains a game of chance. There's always the possibility that you have a high probability to land on the desired tile but end up landing a foe that would deplete your remaining life. Each click 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 following level rather than testing fate.

Tools such as explosive devices aid in reducing the chance, similar to some special skills. An adventurer's signature move, charged after selecting four tiles, allows players to select a column in place of a horizontal line on a turn. If you play this move wisely, you can save that move for the right moment to sidestep a dangerous choice. There's a shocking level of strategy in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has a final update planned until the final game is launched. A new character and a additional end-level foe are expected to drop by the end of January. The full launch likely won't be far behind, but the game's developers haven't committed to a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Thought

Regardless of when it's fully released, you might want to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I have been completely engrossed with it, finding all of hidden nuances and saving my accumulated currency every session to access a constant flow of persistent upgrades, including new characters and items available for acquisition during a run. As of now, I am yet to found the deepest level, and I suspect I'll still be working on that task when 1.0 finally hits. Sign me up for the long haul.