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After playing more than 200 fresh titles this year, I am officially wrapping things up on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I feel content with the ultimate rankings, despite being aware plenty of fantastic releases likely fell under the radar. Now, there's nothing for me to do except relax, take a short break, and maybe enjoy a nice walk in the— well, shoot, discovered one more amazing experience. So much for my peaceful respite!

A Premature Front-Runner Appears

In my more off-hours play, typically earmarked for a selection of unusual games, I've discovered what could be my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a traditional dungeon crawler into a probability-fueled game of high stakes danger and payoff. Take this as a preview for the in-the-know: If you enjoy in knowing about a game before it's popular, test out Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your indie credit card.

A Tactical Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's different from everything I've previously experienced. The premise is that you need to explore a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper on a quest for the sun, which has disappeared from this mythical realm. Mechanically, this results in some recognizable genre framework. Select a character possessing unique attributes and skills, defeat enemies on every stage of enemies, pick up some passive buffs (represented as teeth), and overcome a few stage-ending champions. Simple enough!

The Unique Core Mechanic

How you truly navigate a area, is unique. Each instance you enter a new floor, the game presents a 4x4 grid of boxes. Each square features a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To explore a room, you choose on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you select is determined by luck.

You could encounter a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a 25% chance of hitting any given square in a row.

After that, the probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you choose on a safer line first and try to make less risky choices early? This is the push-your-luck gameplay in action in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The meta-layer is that your odds can be manipulated during an attempt by picking up teeth that change what things you're more attracted to. To illustrate, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will also decrease the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Creating a build is about manipulating math as best you can to have a improved likelihood at selecting the optimal square.
• In one run, I focused my attribute improvements toward physical attack/defense and chose every teeth I could that would boost my chances of attracting me toward monsters aligned with that strength.
• During a separate session, I constructed my hero around reward boxes and coupled it with a perk that would debuff nearby foes each time I claimed a reward.

The strategic possibilities are somewhat constrained, but they are sufficient to work with to let you manipulate probabilities to your preference.

A Constant Tension

Of course, it remains a game of chance. There remains the possibility that you have a likely outcome to land on the preferred space but wind up hitting a monster that would take out your last bit of health. All selections is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you navigate a level and decide when to keep clicking or to proceed to the following level instead of testing fate.

Tools such as explosive devices help cut down the chance, as do some hero powers. One hero's signature move, charged after selecting four tiles, allows players to choose a vertical line rather than a row for that move. By employing this move wisely, you can save that move for an optimal time to avoid a risky decision. You'll find an astonishing amount of nuance in the basic action of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has another update planned before the complete edition is released. A new character and a fresh guardian are planned for release by the end of January. The 1.0 release likely won't be long after, but the game's developers haven't committed to a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Endorsement

Regardless of when it's fully released, you should consider put Sol Cesto in your sights. I've been positively obsessed with it, uncovering each of little secrets and storing my run rewards every session to reveal a continuous trickle of persistent upgrades, including additional heroes and items I can buy during a run. I still haven't completed the dungeon, and I get the feeling I'll continue working on that task when the full version launches. Sign me up for the entire experience.