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After playing well over 200 new releases this year, I'm formally wrapping things up on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I am at peace with the final results, even knowing numerous excellent games likely fell by the wayside. At this point, it's nothing for me to do but sit back, take a short break, and possibly go for a pleasant stroll in the— ah crap, stumbled upon a brilliant title. So much for my plans!

A Surprising Contender Emerges

During my casual gaming time, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've encountered potentially my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that deconstructs a traditional labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of significant risk peril and prize. View this a hipster's insider tip: If you relish being aware of a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

A Calculated Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's different from everything I'm familiar with. The setup is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper in search of the sun, which has gone missing from its world. When you play, this creates some recognizable genre framework. Select a character who has parameters and powers, clear floor after floor of monsters, acquire some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and vanquish a few biome bosses. Straightforward, right!

The Unique Core Mechanic

The method by which you truly navigate a area, is unique. Every time you begin a fresh level, the game presents a 4x4 grid of boxes. All spaces either contains a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To explore a room, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the specific tile you select 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 landing on any given square in a row.

Subsequently, your odds shift. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you choose on a different row first and try to make safer moves early? This is the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating after you develop an understanding of it.

Shaping the Odds

The procedural hook is that your probabilities can be influenced through a run by picking up teeth that modify the types of squares you're more likely to land on. For example, you could acquire a perk that will lower your chances of landing on a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of getting a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a higher chance at selecting the optimal square.
• During one attempt, I put all my power boosts toward brute force and chose every teeth possible that would boost my chances of landing on monsters of that variety.
• On a different attempt, I built my character around treasure chests and coupled it with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters whenever I claimed a reward.

The strategic possibilities are somewhat constrained, but it provides ample to engage with to let you manipulate numbers the way you want.

A Persistent Tension

Of course, at its heart, it's a game of chance. You constantly face the possibility that you have a likely outcome to land on the preferred space but wind up hitting a monster that would deplete your remaining life. Each click is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you work through a stage and determine if to continue selecting or when to move on to the subsequent stage instead of testing fate.

Items like enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, just like some hero powers. One hero's special power, activated once making four moves, enables you to click on a vertical line in place of a horizontal row on a turn. If you play this strategically, you can save that move for an optimal time to sidestep a dangerous choice. There's a shocking level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is remaining in its preview phase, and it has another update scheduled until the full version is launched. Another playable adventurer and a new boss are planned for release sometime in January. The full launch probably isn't far behind, but the game's developers haven't set a concrete launch day yet.

A Final Thought

Regardless of when it's fully released, you should consider put Sol Cesto in your sights. For the past week, I've been completely engrossed with it, discovering its hidden nuances and banking my earned gold every session to access a constant flow of meta progression rewards, such as new characters and items available for acquisition mid-attempt. To this day, I have not reached the bottom, and I have a sense I'll still be pursuing that objective when 1.0 finally hits. Sign me up for the entire experience.