I Think My First Favorite Game of 2026.
After playing in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, I am officially closing the book on 2025. My annual roundup is out in the world, and I feel content with the concluding selections, even knowing plenty of stellar titles may have dropped through the cracks. At this point, it's plan is to but sit back, take a short break, and possibly go for a nice walk in the— well, shoot, found another amazing experience. So much for my intentions!
A Surprising Contender Emerges
With my off-hours play, often set aside for a selection of unusual games, I've discovered potentially my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a traditional dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of major consequence risk and reward. View this a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it's popular, give Sol Cesto a try so you can make a dent in your indie credit card.
A Strategic Dungeon-Crawling Innovation
Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's different from everything I'm familiar with. The premise is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has gone missing from the fantasy world. In practice, this creates some recognizable genre framework. Choose an adventurer with their own stats and abilities, clear floor after floor of foes, collect some stat improvements (which are teeth), and vanquish a few area guardians. Straightforward, right!
The Novel Gameplay Loop
The way you truly navigate a chamber, however. Each instance you start another stage, you see a sixteen-square board of boxes. Each square features a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To make a move, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but which square you end up on is up to chance.
You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a one-in-four probability of hitting a particular space in a row.
Then, you'll chances are recalculated. So do you go for it, or do you choose on a different row first and attempt some more cautious selections early? This is the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing after you develop a feel for it.
Influencing Chance
The roguelike twist is that your percentages can be shaped through a run by picking up teeth that alter which objects you're drawn toward. To illustrate, you could acquire a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of finding a treasure chest too.
- Crafting a loadout is about influencing the statistics optimally to have a improved likelihood at selecting the optimal square.
- On a particular session, I focused my stat upgrades toward melee prowess and selected all the teeth I could that would boost my chances of being drawn to monsters of that variety.
- In another run, I constructed my hero around treasure chests and coupled it with a perk that would debuff nearby foes each time I opened a chest.
The strategic possibilities are somewhat constrained, but they are sufficient to experiment with to let you manipulate the odds the way you want.
A Constant Risk
Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. You constantly face the possibility that you have a high probability to select the preferred space but end up landing on an enemy that would take out your final hit point. Each click is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you clear a floor out and choose whether to keep clicking or to advance to the next floor rather than pushing your luck.
Consumables including explosive devices aid in reducing the chance, as do some hero powers. An adventurer's signature move, activated once selecting four tiles, enables you to click on a vertical column rather than a horizontal row for that move. Should you use this strategically, you can save that move for an optimal time to avoid a risky decision. There's a shocking amount of nuance in the basic action of clicking.
The Road to 1.0
Sol Cesto is currently in development, and it has another update scheduled until the complete edition is released. Another playable adventurer and a additional end-level foe are scheduled to arrive by the end of January. The official version probably isn't much later, but the studio haven't committed to a concrete launch day yet.
A Concluding Recommendation
Regardless of when the complete game arrives, you might want to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I have been completely engrossed with it, finding all of small details and saving my accumulated currency in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of persistent upgrades, such as additional heroes and items purchasable mid-attempt. As of now, I am yet to reached the bottom, and I suspect I'll still be pursuing that objective when 1.0 finally hits. Sign me up for the entire experience.
