I'm Convinced My First Must-Play Title of 2026.

After playing in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, It's time to closing the book on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I feel content with the ultimate rankings, even knowing a host of fantastic releases probably slipped by the wayside. Currently, my only job is to but sit back, disconnect briefly, and maybe enjoy a pleasant stroll in the— oh no, stumbled upon a great game. So much for my intentions!

An Early Contender Emerges

During my off-hours play, often set aside for a handful of quirky titles, I've encountered what might become my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that deconstructs a traditional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of high stakes peril and prize. Take this as a preview for the in-the-know: If you take pride being aware of a game before it's popular, test out Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your indie credit card.

A Strategic Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's a departure from all I've previously experienced. The setup is that you must venture into a dungeon, descending floor after floor in search of the sun, which has gone missing from its world. When you play, this results in some familiar roguelike structure. Select a character with their own attributes and skills, defeat enemies on every stage of monsters, collect some stat improvements (which are teeth), and overcome a few stage-ending champions. Easy to grasp!

The Novel Core Mechanic

The way you effectively complete a dungeon room, however. Every time you enter a new floor, you're shown a sixteen-square board of boxes. All spaces either contains a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To explore a room, you choose on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you land in is a matter of probability.

You may face a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You begin with a quarter likelihood of selecting a specific tile in a row.

After that, the chances are recalculated. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you choose on a alternative option first and attempt some less risky choices early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get a feel for it.

Shaping the Odds

The procedural hook is that your odds can be manipulated over the course of a session by picking up teeth that change what things you're drawn toward. As an instance, you could acquire a perk that will decrease your odds of hitting a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about manipulating math optimally to have a higher chance at landing where you want.
• During one attempt, I put all my power boosts toward brute force and picked as many teeth I could that would improve my probability of being drawn to monsters of that variety.
• During a separate session, I built my character around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies whenever I secured loot.

The build options are limited, but it provides ample to experiment with to enable you to influence numbers to your preference.

An Ever-Present Tension

Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There's always the chance that you have an 80% chance to land on the preferred space but end up landing a monster that would eliminate your final hit point. All selections is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you navigate a level and determine if to keep clicking or to proceed to the following level instead of risking it all.

Tools such as enemy-killing bombs help cut down the chance, just like some hero powers. An adventurer's unique ability, activated once clearing four squares, allows players to choose a column rather than a row during that action. Should you use this move wisely, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to avoid a risky decision. There's a shocking level of strategy in the basic action of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is remaining in early access, and it has at least one more update planned until the final game is unleashed. A new character and a new boss are scheduled to arrive sometime in January. The full launch may not be much later, but the studio haven't announced a concrete launch day yet.

A Final Recommendation

Regardless of when it's fully released, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I've been thoroughly captivated with it, finding all of hidden nuances and saving my accumulated currency every session to access a constant flow of permanent unlocks, such as fresh adventurers and items I can buy during a run. To this day, I have not reached the bottom, and I suspect I will remain pursuing that objective when the full version launches. Sign me up for the complete journey.