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Following my time with in excess of 200 new releases this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My year-end list is out in the world, and I am at peace with the ultimate rankings, despite being aware plenty of fantastic releases likely fell under the radar. At this point, it's plan is to except relax, disconnect briefly, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— well, shoot, stumbled upon a great game. And just like that, goodbye to my intentions!

A Surprising Favorite Surfaces

With my laid-back sessions, often set aside for a selection of unusual games, I've encountered potentially my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that breaks down a traditional dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of high stakes risk and reward. Consider this an early adopter's heads-up: If you enjoy in knowing about a game before it's popular, give Sol Cesto a try so you can burn a spot in your gaming budget.

A Calculated Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's unlike anything I've previously experienced. The setup is that you need to explore a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper to find the sun, which has disappeared from this mythical realm. When you play, that makes for some recognizable genre framework. Pick a hero with their own stats and abilities, fight through each level of enemies, pick up some stat improvements (in the form of teeth), and vanquish a few stage-ending champions. Simple enough!

The Distinctive Gameplay Loop

How you effectively complete a area, though. Every time you begin a fresh level, you see a sixteen-square board of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To proceed, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the specific tile you end up on is determined by luck.

You might see a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a 25% chance of landing on a specific tile in a row.

After that, the chances are recalculated. So do you press your luck, or do you choose on a different row first and try to make less risky choices early? This is the risk-reward dynamic at play in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing after you develop an understanding of it.

Influencing Chance

The procedural hook is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by gathering teeth that modify the types of squares you're drawn toward. For example, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of hitting a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Developing a strategy is about influencing the statistics optimally to have a better shot at selecting the optimal square.
• In one run, I put all my power boosts toward physical attack/defense and chose every teeth I could that would improve my probability of being drawn to monsters aligned with that strength.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around treasure chests and coupled it with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies each time I opened a chest.

The strategic possibilities are somewhat constrained, but it provides ample to engage with to enable you to influence numbers to your preference.

A Persistent Risk

Naturally, at its heart, it's a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have an 80% chance to land on the square you want but ultimately choose on an enemy that would deplete your last bit of health. Each click is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you navigate a level and determine if to continue selecting or to advance to the following level instead of pushing your luck.

Items like explosive devices aid in reducing the chance, as do some special skills. A particular character's unique ability, activated once making four moves, allows players to choose a vertical line in place of a horizontal row during that action. If you play your cards right, you can reserve that option for a crucial point to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is currently in development, and it has at least one more update planned before the complete edition is launched. Another playable adventurer and a fresh guardian are expected to drop before the conclusion of January. The full launch may not be long after, but the game's developers haven't committed to a specific release window yet.

A Parting Thought

Regardless of when the complete game arrives, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I've been completely engrossed with it, finding all of little secrets and banking my earned gold every session to access a constant flow of permanent unlocks, featuring new characters and items purchasable during a run. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I suspect I'll continue pursuing that objective when the official release drops. Count me in for the complete journey.