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Following my time with in excess of 200 recent games this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is out in the world, and I am at peace with the concluding selections, even knowing plenty of fantastic releases probably slipped under the radar. Currently, my only nothing for me to do but sit back, take a short break, and perhaps take a refreshing hike in the— well, shoot, found another brilliant title. And just like that, goodbye to my plans!

A Premature Favorite Surfaces

With my off-hours play, typically earmarked for a few oddball curiosities, I've encountered potentially my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a conventional labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of major consequence risk and reward. View this an early adopter's heads-up: If you relish being aware of a game before it's cool, sample Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your indie credit card.

A Calculated Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's a departure from all I've previously experienced. The setup is that you need to explore a dungeon, descending floor after floor to find the sun, which has gone missing from this mythical realm. In practice, this creates some familiar roguelike structure. Select a character who has attributes and skills, clear floor after floor of enemies, collect some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and vanquish a few biome bosses. Straightforward, right!

The Distinctive Gameplay Loop

The method by which you actually clear a dungeon room, however. Whenever you begin a fresh level, you're shown a sixteen-square board of boxes. All spaces features a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To explore a room, you choose on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you end up on is a matter of probability.

You may face a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a 25% chance of landing on any given square in a row.

After that, the chances are recalculated. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you choose on a different row first and try to make less risky choices early? This is the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get an understanding of it.

Manipulating Probability

The roguelike twist is that your odds can be manipulated over the course of a session by picking up teeth that alter which objects you're more likely to land on. For example, you could acquire a perk that will decrease your odds of encountering a trap, but will also decrease the odds of finding a reward too.

• Crafting a loadout is about manipulating math optimally to have a better shot at getting your desired outcome.
• During one attempt, I invested my attribute improvements toward melee prowess and chose every teeth I could that would increase my odds of landing on monsters of that variety.
• 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 claimed a reward.

The strategic possibilities are not endless, but they are sufficient to engage with to enable you to influence the odds the way you want.

A Constant Risk

Naturally, at its heart, it's a game of chance. You constantly face the risk that you have a likely outcome to land on the square you want but wind up hitting a monster that would deplete your last bit of health. Every move is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you work through a stage and decide when to continue selecting or to advance to the following level instead of testing fate.

Items like destructive ordnance help cut down the chance, similar to some character abilities. An adventurer's signature move, powered up by clearing four squares, enables you to click on a column rather than a horizontal row for that move. If you play this move wisely, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. There's a shocking amount of nuance in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has a final update to go before the final game is unleashed. Another playable adventurer and a fresh guardian are planned for release by the end of January. The official version likely won't be much later, but the game's developers haven't set a specific release window yet.

A Parting Thought

No matter when the complete game arrives, you might want to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I've been positively obsessed with it, uncovering each of little secrets and saving my accumulated currency in each run to access a constant flow of meta progression rewards, including fresh adventurers and items I can buy during a run. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I get the feeling I will remain working on that task when the full version launches. Count me in for the long haul.