🔗 Share this article I'm Convinced My First Must-Play Title of 2026. Following my time with well over 200 fresh titles this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is out in the world, and I am at peace with the final results, even knowing a host of excellent games likely fell through the cracks. Currently, my only job is to except relax, unplug a little, and possibly go for a nice walk in the— oh no, discovered one more amazing experience. There go my plans! An Early Favorite Surfaces In my more off-hours play, often set aside for a handful of quirky titles, I've come across what could be my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a classic labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of major consequence danger and payoff. Take this as a hipster's insider tip: If you relish discovering a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your indie credit card. A Calculated Genre Subversion Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's unlike anything I've ever played. The concept is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, going down level by level to find the sun, which has vanished from this mythical realm. In practice, that makes for some recognizable genre framework. Pick a hero with their own stats and abilities, clear floor after floor of enemies, acquire some passive buffs (represented as teeth), and overcome a few area guardians. Simple enough! The Novel Gameplay Loop The way you effectively complete a dungeon room, is unique. Whenever you enter a new floor, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square either contains a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To make a move, you simply click on one of the four rows, but the exact space you select is a matter of probability. You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You start with a one-in-four probability of hitting a specific tile in a row. After that, the chances are recalculated. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you opt on a safer line first and try to make less risky choices early? That's the push-your-luck gameplay on display in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing when you acquire an understanding of it. Influencing Chance The roguelike twist is that your odds can be manipulated through a run by gathering teeth that change what things you're more attracted to. To illustrate, you could acquire a perk that will decrease your odds of hitting a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of getting a treasure chest too. Developing a strategy is about influencing the statistics to the utmost to have a improved likelihood at landing where you want. During one attempt, I put all my stat upgrades toward physical attack/defense and chose every teeth possible that would improve my probability of attracting me toward monsters aligned with that strength. During a separate session, I constructed my hero around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would debuff nearby foes each time I claimed a reward. The strategic possibilities are limited, but they are sufficient to work with to enable you to influence probabilities according to your strategy. A Constant Tension 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 monster that would take out your final hit point. All selections is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you work through a stage and choose whether to continue selecting or to advance to the subsequent stage rather than risking it all. Tools such as destructive ordnance help cut down the chance, as do some special skills. An adventurer's unique ability, charged after making four moves, enables you to choose a vertical line instead of a horizontal line for that move. If you play this strategically, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. There's a shocking level of strategy in the simple act of clicking. The Road to 1.0 Sol Cesto is currently in development, and it has a final update scheduled until the final game is launched. Another playable adventurer and a fresh guardian are expected to drop sometime in January. The full launch likely won't be far behind, but the creators haven't set a concrete launch day yet. A Parting Thought Whenever it's fully released, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I've been completely engrossed with it, finding all of hidden nuances and banking my earned gold every session to reveal a continuous trickle of meta progression rewards, including additional heroes and items I can buy mid-attempt. To this day, I have not reached the bottom, and I suspect I will remain attempting that goal when 1.0 finally hits. Count me in for the long haul.