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Having experienced well over 200 new releases this year, I am officially wrapping things up on 2025. My annual roundup is out in the world, and I am at peace with the ultimate rankings, despite being aware a host of stellar titles likely fell under the radar. At this point, it's job is to but sit back, take a short break, and perhaps take a refreshing hike in the— well, shoot, stumbled upon a amazing experience. So much for my peaceful respite!

An Early Contender Emerges

With my off-hours play, often set aside for a few oddball curiosities, I've discovered what could be my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a conventional dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of high stakes peril and prize. Consider this a preview for the in-the-know: If you relish being aware of a game before it's popular, test out Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot 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, descending floor after floor to find the sun, which has disappeared from the fantasy world. In practice, that makes for some familiar roguelike structure. Select a character who has parameters and powers, fight through each level of monsters, collect some permanent upgrades (represented as teeth), and vanquish a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Distinctive Central System

The way you truly navigate a dungeon room, though. Each instance you enter a new floor, you see a sixteen-square board of boxes. Each square features a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To proceed, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but the specific tile you end up on is up to chance.

You may face a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You start with a 25% chance of selecting a particular space in a row.

After that, the chances are recalculated. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you click on a different row first and try to make more cautious selections early? That's the push-your-luck gameplay in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The procedural hook is that your percentages can be shaped during an attempt by gathering teeth that alter which objects you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you may obtain a perk that will decrease your odds of encountering a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about influencing the statistics to the utmost to have a improved likelihood at selecting the optimal square.
• On a particular session, I invested my stat upgrades toward physical attack/defense and chose every teeth I could that would boost my chances of being drawn to monsters with that damage type.
• On a different attempt, I constructed my hero around treasure chests and coupled it with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies every time I opened a chest.

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

A Constant Gamble

Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have a high probability to hit the desired tile but ultimately choose on an enemy that would deplete your last bit of health. Every move is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you clear a floor out and choose whether to keep clicking or when to move on to the following level as opposed to risking it all.

Tools such as destructive ordnance assist in minimizing the chance, as do some hero powers. A particular character's special power, powered up by selecting four tiles, allows players to choose a vertical column rather than a horizontal row on a turn. By employing this move wisely, you can save that move for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. 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 at least one more update scheduled until the complete edition is released. Another playable adventurer and a fresh guardian are expected to drop before the conclusion of January. The 1.0 release likely won't be much later, but the creators haven't set a final date yet.

A Parting Recommendation

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 little secrets and storing my run rewards every session to unlock a steady stream of persistent upgrades, such as fresh adventurers and items purchasable while playing. As of now, I am yet to found the deepest level, and I get the feeling I'll continue attempting that goal when the full version launches. Count me in for the long haul.