🔗 Share this article I Think My First Favorite Game of 2026. Having experienced more than 200 fresh titles this year, It's time to closing the book on 2025. My best-of compilation is out in the world, and I'm satisfied with the ultimate rankings, even knowing plenty of excellent games likely fell under the radar. Currently, my only plan is to except relax, unplug a little, and possibly go for a pleasant stroll in the— well, shoot, found another amazing experience. There go my peaceful respite! A Premature Front-Runner Appears During my off-hours play, usually reserved for a selection of unusual games, I've discovered potentially my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a traditional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of major consequence risk and reward. View this an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride discovering a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your gaming budget. A Calculated Genre Subversion Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's a departure from all I've ever played. The concept is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper in search of the sun, which has gone missing from the fantasy world. Mechanically, that makes for some recognizable genre framework. Pick a hero who has stats and abilities, fight through each level of enemies, acquire some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and defeat a few biome bosses. Straightforward, right! The Novel Core Mechanic The way you truly navigate a area, is unique. Whenever you start another stage, the game presents a four-by-four matrix of boxes. All spaces holds a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To proceed, you choose on one of the horizontal lines, but the specific tile you land in is determined by luck. You may face a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a one-in-four probability of selecting a particular space in a row. After that, the probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you click on a different row first and attempt some less risky choices early? This is the tension between chance and safety on display in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get a feel for it. Shaping the Odds The roguelike twist is that your odds can be manipulated during an attempt by gathering teeth that modify the types of squares you're more likely to land on. For example, you may obtain a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of landing on a reward too. Crafting a loadout is about tweaking the numbers to the utmost to have a better shot at landing where you want. During one attempt, I put all my attribute improvements toward brute force and chose every teeth possible that would improve my probability of landing on monsters aligned with that strength. In another run, I built my character around reward boxes and coupled it with a perk that would debuff nearby foes each time I opened a chest. The strategic possibilities are limited, but they are sufficient to engage with to allow you to tweak numbers according to your strategy. An Ever-Present Risk Naturally, it remains a game of chance. There's always the possibility that you have an 80% chance to hit the desired tile but end up landing a foe that would eliminate your last bit of health. Every move is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you navigate a level and decide when to press onward or to proceed to the next floor rather than pushing your luck. Items like enemy-killing bombs aid in reducing the chance, as do some character abilities. A particular character's special power, charged after selecting four tiles, allows players to select a vertical column in place of a horizontal line on a turn. By employing this move wisely, you can hold that ability for the right moment to avoid a risky decision. You'll find an astonishing degree of depth in the basic action of clicking. The Road to 1.0 Sol Cesto is currently in development, and it has at least one more update to go before the final game is unleashed. Another playable adventurer and a fresh guardian are planned for release before the conclusion of January. The official version likely won't be long after, but the game's developers haven't announced a final date yet. A Concluding Recommendation No matter when it's fully released, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I have been positively obsessed with it, discovering its small details and storing my run rewards per attempt to unlock a steady stream of meta progression rewards, including additional heroes and items I can buy while playing. I still haven't reached the bottom, and I suspect I will remain working on that task when 1.0 finally hits. Count me in for the complete journey.