I Believe My First Top Pick of 2026.

Having experienced more than 200 recent games this year, I'm formally turning the page on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I'm satisfied with the final results, accepting that plenty of fantastic releases may have dropped through the cracks. At this point, it's nothing for me to do other than unwind, take a short break, and maybe enjoy a nice walk in the— oh no, discovered one more brilliant title. And just like that, goodbye to my peaceful respite!

A Surprising Favorite Surfaces

In my more laid-back sessions, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've encountered potentially my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a classic labyrinth explorer into a probability-fueled game of significant risk risk and reward. Consider this an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride discovering a game before it hits the mainstream, give Sol Cesto a try so you can make a dent in your wallet for unique titles.

A Calculated Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler 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 on a quest for the sun, which has gone missing from the fantasy world. Mechanically, this creates some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer possessing unique parameters and powers, defeat enemies on every stage of monsters, acquire some passive buffs (which are teeth), and overcome a few area guardians. Straightforward, right!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

How you actually clear a chamber, however. Every time you enter a new floor, you see a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Every tile either contains a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To explore a room, you choose on one of the horizontal lines, but which square you select is a matter of probability.

You might see a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You start with a 25% chance of hitting a specific tile in a row.

Then, you'll odds shift. So do you press your luck, or do you choose on a alternative option first and try to make less risky choices early? That's the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing after you develop its rhythm.

Influencing Chance

The roguelike twist is that your odds can be manipulated over the course of a session by collecting teeth that change what things you're more attracted to. To illustrate, you could acquire a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will also decrease the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Crafting a loadout is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a improved likelihood at getting your desired outcome.
• In one run, I invested my attribute improvements toward brute force and chose every teeth I could that would boost my chances of landing on monsters with that damage type.
• In another run, I built my character around reward boxes and combined that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes each time I opened a chest.

The customization choices are not endless, but there's enough to engage with to enable you to influence numbers to your preference.

An Ever-Present Gamble

Naturally, it remains a game of chance. There remains the chance that you have a high probability to land on the square you want but wind up hitting a foe that would eliminate your last bit of health. Every move is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you navigate a level and choose whether to keep clicking or to proceed to the subsequent stage as opposed to pushing your luck.

Items like enemy-killing bombs aid in reducing the chance, just like some hero powers. A particular character's unique ability, charged after making four moves, enables you to choose a vertical line in place of a horizontal line for that move. If you play your cards right, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising amount of nuance in the simple act of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is still in development, and it has another update to go until the full version is released. A new character and a new boss are expected to drop by the end of January. The official version likely won't be long after, but the game's developers haven't committed to a specific release window yet.

A Parting Endorsement

No matter when the complete game arrives, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I have been completely engrossed with it, discovering its small details and banking my earned gold every session to access a constant flow of meta progression rewards, including new characters and items purchasable while playing. I still haven't found the deepest level, and I suspect I'll still be working on that task when the full version launches. Sign me up for the long haul.