Following my time with more than 200 recent games this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My year-end list is published, and I am at peace with the concluding selections, accepting that a host of excellent games may have dropped through the cracks. Now, there's plan is to except relax, disconnect briefly, and perhaps take a nice walk in the— ah crap, discovered one more brilliant title. So much for my plans!
In my more laid-back sessions, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across potentially my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that breaks down a conventional labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of high stakes risk and reward. Consider this a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride being aware of a game before it's cool, sample Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your wallet for unique titles.
Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's a departure from all I've ever played. The setup is that you must venture into a dungeon, going down level by level on a quest for the sun, which has vanished from the fantasy world. In practice, this results in some standard crawl progression. Pick a hero possessing unique attributes and skills, defeat enemies on every stage of foes, acquire some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and vanquish a few stage-ending champions. Easy to grasp!
How you effectively complete a area, is unique. Whenever you start another stage, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square features a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To explore a room, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but the specific tile you land in is up to chance.
You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You start with a 25% chance of hitting any given square in a row.
Then, you'll odds shift. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you choose on a alternative option 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 its rhythm.
The roguelike twist is that your probabilities can be influenced through a run by picking up teeth that modify the types of squares you're drawn toward. As an instance, you may obtain a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will also decrease the odds of getting a treasure chest too.
The build options are limited, but there's enough to experiment with to allow you to tweak the odds according to your strategy.
Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. You constantly face the risk that you have a likely outcome to hit the desired tile but ultimately choose a monster that would take out your last bit of health. Each click is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you clear a floor out and determine if to keep clicking or when to move on to the next floor rather than risking it all.
Items like explosive devices help cut down the chance, just like some special skills. A particular character's unique ability, activated once making four moves, enables you to choose a vertical line in place of a horizontal row for that move. By employing your cards right, you can hold that ability for the right moment to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.
Sol Cesto is remaining in development, and it has another update scheduled before the complete edition is released. A new character and a additional end-level foe are planned for release sometime in January. The official version may not be far behind, but the studio haven't committed to a specific release window yet.
No matter when it's fully released, you ought to put Sol Cesto in your sights. For the past week, I've been completely engrossed with it, finding all of little secrets and saving my accumulated currency in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of meta progression rewards, such as additional heroes and items purchasable while playing. As of now, I am yet to found the deepest level, and I have a sense I will remain working on that task when the full version launches. I'm committed for the long haul.
Elara is a seasoned gaming journalist with a passion for slot mechanics and player strategies.
