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After playing more than 200 recent games this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My annual roundup is published, and I feel content with the concluding selections, despite being aware numerous excellent games probably slipped through the cracks. At this point, it's plan is to but sit back, unplug a little, and perhaps take a nice walk in the— oh no, discovered one more amazing experience. So much for my peaceful respite!

An Early Contender Emerges

With my off-hours play, typically earmarked for a selection of unusual games, I've discovered what might become my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that breaks down a classic labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of major consequence peril and prize. Consider this a preview for the in-the-know: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it's cool, give Sol Cesto a try so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

A Strategic Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's unlike anything I've ever played. The setup is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper on a quest for the sun, which has gone missing from this mythical realm. When you play, this creates some familiar roguelike structure. Choose an adventurer with their own parameters and powers, defeat enemies on every stage of monsters, acquire some passive buffs (in the form of teeth), and defeat a few area guardians. Easy to grasp!

The Novel Central System

The way you actually clear a dungeon room, however. Every time you enter a new floor, you're shown a 4x4 grid of boxes. Each square holds a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To make a move, you simply click on one of the four rows, but the exact space you end up on is a matter of probability.

You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a quarter likelihood of hitting any given square in a row.

Then, you'll chances are recalculated. So do you go for it, or do you choose on a safer line first and try to make safer moves early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get its rhythm.

Influencing Chance

The roguelike twist is that your probabilities can be influenced over the course of a session by picking up teeth that alter which objects you're drawn toward. For example, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of encountering a trap, but will also decrease the odds of getting a reward too.

• Developing a strategy is about influencing the statistics optimally to have a improved likelihood at landing where you want.
• In one run, I put all my power boosts toward melee prowess and selected all the teeth I could that would boost my chances of attracting me toward monsters of that variety.
• In another run, I built my character around reward boxes and combined that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes each time I opened a chest.

The customization choices are somewhat constrained, but they are sufficient to experiment with to let you manipulate numbers according to your strategy.

An Ever-Present Risk

Of course, it's still a game of chance. You constantly face the possibility that you have an 80% chance to select the desired tile but ultimately choose a foe that would deplete your remaining life. All selections is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you work through a stage and decide when to continue selecting or to proceed to the following level instead of testing fate.

Items like explosive devices assist in minimizing the chance, just like some character abilities. A particular character's special power, charged after clearing four squares, allows players to choose a vertical column instead of a horizontal row on a turn. If you play this move wisely, you can save that move for an optimal time to sidestep a dangerous choice. It's a surprising level of strategy in the basic action of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is currently in development, and it has another update scheduled before the complete edition is launched. A new character and a additional end-level foe are planned for release sometime in January. The full launch may not be much later, but the creators haven't set a final date yet.

A Final Recommendation

No matter when the complete game arrives, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I've been positively obsessed with it, uncovering each of small details and storing my run rewards per attempt to unlock a steady stream of permanent unlocks, such as new characters and items purchasable during a run. To this day, I have not reached the bottom, and I get the feeling I will remain pursuing that objective when the official release drops. Count me in for the entire experience.