I'm Convinced I Already Have Top Pick of 2026.

Following my time with in excess of 200 recent games this year, I am officially turning the page on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I am at peace with the concluding selections, even knowing a host of excellent games likely fell under the radar. Now, there's nothing for me to do but sit back, take a short break, and possibly go for a pleasant stroll in the— well, shoot, discovered one more brilliant title. There go my plans!

A Premature Favorite Surfaces

With my casual gaming time, often set aside for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across what could be my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that deconstructs a traditional dungeon crawler into a probability-fueled game of major consequence danger and payoff. Take this as a preview for the in-the-know: If you take pride discovering a game before it's cool, sample Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your indie credit card.

A Strategic Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's unlike anything I've ever played. The premise is that you must venture into a dungeon, going down level by level in search of the sun, which has vanished from this mythical realm. In practice, this creates some recognizable genre framework. Pick a hero who has parameters and powers, defeat enemies on every stage of enemies, pick up some stat improvements (in the form of teeth), and vanquish a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Novel Core Mechanic

How you truly navigate a area, is unique. Every time you start another stage, the game presents a sixteen-square board of boxes. Each square holds a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To explore a room, you choose on one of the horizontal lines, but which square you land in is up to chance.

You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You begin with a 25% chance of hitting any given square in a row.

After that, the probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you take the risk, or do you choose on a different row first and aim for more cautious selections early? Herein lies the risk-reward dynamic on display in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing after you develop its rhythm.

Shaping the Odds

The procedural hook is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by collecting teeth that modify the types of squares you're more attracted to. As an instance, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of hitting a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Crafting a loadout is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a better shot at landing where you want.
• During one attempt, I put all my attribute improvements toward physical attack/defense and selected all the teeth I could that would boost my chances 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 weaken adjacent enemies whenever I claimed a reward.

The build options are somewhat constrained, but it provides ample to work with to allow you to tweak probabilities to your preference.

A Persistent Risk

Naturally, it remains a game of chance. There's always the possibility that you have a likely outcome to select the preferred space but ultimately choose a foe that would eliminate your final hit point. Each click is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you clear a floor out and decide when to continue selecting or when to move on to the next floor as opposed to risking it all.

Items like enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some character abilities. An adventurer's unique ability, activated once clearing four squares, enables you to click on a column instead of a horizontal line during that action. If you play your cards right, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. There's a shocking amount of nuance in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is remaining in its preview phase, and it has a final update to go until the full version is released. An additional hero and a new boss are expected to drop sometime in January. The 1.0 release probably isn't much later, but the creators haven't announced a final date yet.

A Parting Thought

Whenever it's fully released, you should consider put Sol Cesto in your sights. For the past week, I've been completely engrossed with it, finding all of hidden nuances and banking my earned gold every session to access a constant flow of meta progression rewards, including additional heroes and items available for acquisition mid-attempt. I still haven't completed the dungeon, and I get the feeling I'll still be pursuing that objective when the full version launches. Count me in for the entire experience.