🔗 Share this article I Believe I Already Have Top Pick of 2026. Following my time with well over 200 new releases this year, I'm formally closing the book on 2025. My annual roundup is published, and I am at peace with the concluding selections, despite being aware plenty of fantastic releases may have dropped through the cracks. Currently, my only plan is to but sit back, unplug a little, and maybe enjoy a refreshing hike in the— oh no, stumbled upon a brilliant title. There go my intentions! A Surprising Contender Emerges In my more off-hours play, usually reserved for a selection of unusual games, I've discovered what could be my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a traditional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of significant risk risk and reward. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you enjoy being aware of a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your wallet for unique titles. A Calculated Roguelike Twist Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's a departure from all I'm familiar with. The setup is that you need to explore a dungeon, descending floor after floor to find the sun, which has disappeared from its world. In practice, that makes for some familiar roguelike structure. Pick a hero possessing unique attributes and skills, defeat enemies on every stage of monsters, pick up some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and defeat a few stage-ending champions. Simple enough! The Distinctive Gameplay Loop The method by which you effectively complete a dungeon room, is unique. Every time you start another stage, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To proceed, you choose on one of the four rows, but the specific tile you end up on is determined by luck. You could encounter a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You begin with a 25% chance of selecting any given square in a row. Subsequently, your odds shift. So do you take the risk, or do you opt on a safer line first and try to make less risky choices early? That's the risk-reward dynamic at play in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get a feel for it. Manipulating Probability The procedural hook is that your probabilities can be influenced over the course of a session by picking up teeth that change what things you're more attracted to. To illustrate, you might get a perk that will lower your chances of encountering a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of getting a reward too. Crafting a loadout is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a better shot at selecting the optimal square. In one run, I put all my power boosts toward brute force and chose every teeth I could that would increase my odds of attracting me toward monsters of that variety. During a separate session, I constructed my hero around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies each time I opened a chest. The build options are not endless, but there's enough to engage with to allow you to tweak probabilities to your preference. An Ever-Present Tension Naturally, it's still a game of chance. There remains the risk that you have an 80% chance to select the desired tile but wind up hitting 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 determine if to continue selecting or when to move on to the next floor rather than testing fate. Tools such as explosive devices aid in reducing the chance, as do some special skills. One hero's special power, powered up by making four moves, lets gamers to select a vertical line rather than a horizontal line on a turn. Should you use your cards right, you can save that move for an optimal time to avoid a risky decision. You'll find an astonishing amount of nuance in the basic action of clicking. Future Development Sol Cesto is currently in its preview phase, and it has another update scheduled before the complete edition is unleashed. Another playable adventurer and a fresh guardian are planned for release sometime in January. The 1.0 release likely won't be far behind, but the studio haven't committed to a concrete launch day yet. A Concluding Thought Regardless of when it's fully released, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I have been positively obsessed with it, uncovering each of little secrets and banking my earned gold per attempt to access a constant flow of meta progression rewards, including fresh adventurers and items available for acquisition while playing. As of now, I am yet to found the deepest level, and I get the feeling I will remain pursuing that objective when the full version launches. Count me in for the long haul.