I Think I've Already Found Favorite Game of 2026.

After playing more than 200 new releases this year, I am officially closing the book on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I'm satisfied with the concluding selections, even knowing a host of fantastic releases may have dropped under the radar. Now, there's plan is to except relax, disconnect briefly, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— oh no, stumbled upon a brilliant title. So much for my intentions!

An Early Contender Emerges

With my laid-back sessions, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've discovered what could be my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a classic dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of significant risk danger and payoff. Consider this an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride discovering a game before it's popular, test out Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your gaming budget.

A Calculated Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's a departure from all I've ever played. The concept is that you must venture into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper on a quest for the sun, which has gone missing from its world. In practice, this creates some recognizable genre framework. Select a character with their own attributes and skills, defeat enemies on every stage of monsters, pick up some passive buffs (represented as teeth), and overcome a few area guardians. Easy to grasp!

The Distinctive Central System

The method by which you truly navigate a area, though. Every time you start another stage, you're shown a 4x4 grid of boxes. Each square holds a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To explore a room, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but which square you end up on is determined by luck.

You could encounter a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You initially will have a one-in-four probability of hitting a specific tile in a row.

Then, you'll probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you click on a different row first and try to make safer moves early? Herein lies the risk-reward dynamic at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing after you develop a feel for it.

Shaping the Odds

The roguelike twist is that your probabilities can be influenced over the course of a session by collecting teeth that modify the types of squares you're more attracted to. As an instance, you may obtain a perk that will lower your chances of hitting a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about influencing the statistics optimally to have a higher chance at selecting the optimal square.
• During one attempt, I put all my attribute improvements toward brute force and selected all the teeth I could that would increase my odds of landing on monsters aligned with that strength.
• In another run, I constructed my hero around loot caches and paired that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes each time I opened a chest.

The build options are limited, but there's enough to work with to let you manipulate numbers according to your strategy.

A Constant Gamble

Unsurprisingly, it remains a game of chance. You constantly face the risk that you have a likely outcome to hit the preferred space but end up landing a monster that would take out your last bit of health. All selections is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you navigate a level and choose whether to press onward or to advance to the next floor instead of testing fate.

Consumables including enemy-killing bombs help cut down the chance, similar to some hero powers. A particular character's unique ability, charged after making four moves, allows players to click on a column in place of a row for that move. By employing your cards right, you can reserve that option for the right moment to circumvent a perilous selection. There's a shocking level of strategy in the basic action of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has at least one more update scheduled until the final game is unleashed. Another playable adventurer and a additional end-level foe are scheduled to arrive by the end of January. The official version may not be much later, but the game's developers haven't announced a concrete launch day yet.

A Parting Endorsement

Whenever it's fully released, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your radar. I've been positively obsessed with it, finding all of small details and banking my earned gold every session to unlock a steady stream of meta progression rewards, including new characters and items available for acquisition during a run. To this day, I have not reached the bottom, and I get the feeling I'll continue attempting that goal when the full version launches. I'm committed for the long haul.