I Think My First Must-Play Title of 2026.

Having experienced well over 200 recent games this year, I'm formally closing the book on 2025. My annual roundup is published, and I'm satisfied with the ultimate rankings, despite being aware numerous excellent games may have dropped through the cracks. At this point, it's plan is to other than unwind, disconnect briefly, and perhaps take a refreshing hike in the— well, shoot, discovered one more amazing experience. And just like that, goodbye to my intentions!

A Premature Front-Runner Appears

During my casual gaming time, typically earmarked for a handful of quirky titles, I've discovered what might become my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that deconstructs a classic labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of high stakes risk and reward. Take this as a preview for the in-the-know: If you relish in knowing about a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

A Calculated Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's different from everything I've ever played. The premise is that you must venture into a dungeon, descending floor after floor in search of the sun, which has vanished from its world. Mechanically, that makes for some standard crawl progression. Pick a hero with their own parameters and powers, fight through each level of monsters, pick up some stat improvements (in the form of teeth), and overcome a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Distinctive Central System

How you truly navigate a area, is unique. Whenever you start another stage, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. All spaces either contains a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To explore a room, you just select on one of the four rows, but the specific tile you land in is up to chance.

You may face a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a 25% chance of hitting any given square in a row.

Subsequently, your odds shift. The question becomes: Do you take the risk, or do you choose on a different row first and attempt some safer moves early? Herein lies the risk-reward dynamic in action in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get an understanding of it.

Shaping the Odds

The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped through a run by collecting teeth that change what things you're drawn toward. To illustrate, you may obtain a perk that will decrease your odds of hitting a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of getting a treasure chest too.

• Crafting a loadout is about tweaking the numbers to the utmost to have a higher chance at getting your desired outcome.
• During one attempt, I put all my attribute improvements toward physical attack/defense and selected all the teeth possible that would improve my probability of attracting me toward monsters with that damage type.
• During a separate session, I constructed my hero around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters whenever I claimed a reward.

The customization choices are not endless, but it provides ample to experiment with to enable you to influence probabilities according to your strategy.

A Persistent Risk

Unsurprisingly, it's still a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have an 80% chance to select the square you want but wind up hitting on an enemy that would deplete your last bit of health. All selections is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you clear a floor out and determine if to press onward or to advance to the subsequent stage instead of testing fate.

Tools such as destructive ordnance help cut down the chance, just like some special skills. A particular character's special power, activated once selecting four tiles, enables you to click on a column instead of a horizontal line for that move. If you play this move wisely, you can hold that ability for the right moment to circumvent a perilous selection. There's a shocking degree of depth in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has a final update scheduled before the final game is released. Another playable adventurer and a fresh guardian are expected to drop sometime in January. The official version may not be long after, but the studio haven't set a final date yet.

A Final Recommendation

No matter when the complete game arrives, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I've been positively obsessed with it, uncovering each of small details and banking my earned gold in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of meta progression rewards, such as new characters and items I can buy mid-attempt. As of now, I am yet to completed the dungeon, and I have a sense I'll still be pursuing that objective when the full version launches. I'm committed for the complete journey.