I Believe My First Favorite Game of 2026.

After playing well over 200 fresh titles this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My year-end list is out in the world, and I'm satisfied with the concluding selections, despite being aware plenty of fantastic releases likely fell under the radar. Now, there's nothing for me to do other than unwind, take a short break, and possibly go for a refreshing hike in the— oh no, discovered one more amazing experience. There go my peaceful respite!

A Premature Favorite Surfaces

In my more off-hours play, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across what might become my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that deconstructs a classic dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of major consequence risk and reward. Take this as a preview for the in-the-know: If you take pride being aware of a game before it hits the mainstream, test out Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your gaming budget.

A Strategic Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's unlike anything I've ever played. The concept is that you must venture into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper to find the sun, which has vanished from the fantasy world. Mechanically, that makes for some standard crawl progression. Pick a hero with their own stats and abilities, fight through each level of foes, collect some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and vanquish a few biome bosses. Easy to grasp!

The Distinctive Core Mechanic

The way you actually clear a dungeon room, is unique. Every time you begin a fresh level, you see a 4x4 grid of boxes. All spaces features a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To proceed, you simply click 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 multiple foes, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a quarter likelihood of hitting a specific tile in a row.

After that, the odds shift. So do you go for it, or do you click on a different row first and aim for less risky choices early? This is the push-your-luck gameplay at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing after you develop its rhythm.

Shaping the Odds

The roguelike twist is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by picking up teeth that alter which objects you're drawn toward. For example, 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 influencing the statistics as best you can to have a improved likelihood at landing where you want.
• On a particular session, I focused my power boosts toward physical attack/defense and selected all the teeth I could that would improve my probability of landing on monsters aligned with that strength.
• On a different attempt, I developed my adventurer around treasure chests and paired that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters every time I opened a chest.

The customization choices are limited, but it provides ample to engage with to allow you to tweak the odds to your preference.

A Constant Risk

Naturally, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There remains the chance that you have a likely outcome to hit the desired tile but end up landing on an enemy that would eliminate your last bit of health. All selections is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you work through a stage and decide when to press onward or when to move on to the following level rather than testing fate.

Tools such as explosive devices assist in minimizing the chance, as do some character abilities. An adventurer's unique ability, powered up by selecting four tiles, enables you to click on a column in place of a horizontal line during that action. Should you use this move wisely, you can save that move for an optimal time to avoid a risky decision. There's a shocking amount of nuance in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is currently in development, and it has a final update planned until the full version is released. A new character and a fresh guardian are expected to drop sometime in January. The 1.0 release likely won't be long after, but the game's developers haven't announced a specific release window yet.

A Final Thought

No matter when it's fully released, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. For the past week, I've been thoroughly captivated with it, discovering its hidden nuances and saving my accumulated currency per attempt to unlock a steady stream of permanent unlocks, featuring additional heroes and items purchasable during a run. To this day, I have not completed the dungeon, and I get the feeling I will remain pursuing that objective when the full version launches. I'm committed for the complete journey.