I Think I've Already Found Top Pick of 2026.

Following my time with well over 200 fresh titles this year, I'm formally turning the page on 2025. My year-end list is live, and I'm satisfied with the ultimate rankings, even knowing numerous excellent games may have dropped through the cracks. Now, there's plan is to other than unwind, disconnect briefly, and maybe enjoy a nice walk in the— well, shoot, discovered one more brilliant title. There go my intentions!

An Early Favorite Surfaces

During my off-hours play, usually reserved for a selection of unusual games, I've come across what might become my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that breaks down a classic dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of major consequence peril and prize. View this an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it's cool, give Sol Cesto a try so you can punch a hole in your wallet for unique titles.

A Tactical Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's different from everything I'm familiar with. The premise is that you must venture into a dungeon, going down level by level in search of the sun, which has gone missing from this mythical realm. When you play, this results in some recognizable genre framework. Pick a hero possessing unique stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of monsters, pick up some passive buffs (represented as teeth), and overcome a few stage-ending champions. Simple enough!

The Novel Central System

How you effectively complete a chamber, is unique. Whenever you begin a fresh level, you see a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Every tile either contains a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To proceed, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the specific tile you land in is determined by luck.

You may face a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a quarter likelihood of landing on a particular space in a row.

Subsequently, your probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you take the risk, or do you choose on a different row first and aim for less risky choices early? That's the push-your-luck gameplay on display in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The procedural hook is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by picking up teeth that alter which objects you're more attracted to. For example, you could acquire a perk that will reduce the probability of landing on a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Creating a build is about tweaking the numbers optimally to have a higher chance at landing where you want.
• In one run, I focused my attribute improvements toward melee prowess and chose every teeth possible that would boost my chances of attracting me toward monsters of that variety.
• In another run, I built my character around treasure chests and paired that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies whenever I secured loot.

The customization choices are somewhat constrained, but there's enough to experiment with to allow you to tweak the odds to your preference.

A Constant Risk

Of course, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There's always the risk that you have an 80% chance to select the preferred space but end up landing a foe that would deplete your last bit of health. Every move is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you navigate a level and decide when to keep clicking or to proceed to the subsequent stage rather than pushing your luck.

Consumables including enemy-killing bombs aid in reducing the chance, as do some hero powers. One hero's unique ability, activated once making four moves, allows players to choose a column in place of a row for that move. By employing this strategically, you can reserve that option for an optimal time to sidestep a dangerous choice. It's a surprising level of strategy in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

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 scheduled to arrive sometime in January. The full launch probably isn't much later, but the game's developers haven't set a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Thought

Whenever it's fully released, you might want to put Sol Cesto in your sights. For the past week, I've been completely engrossed with it, finding all of little secrets and banking my earned gold per attempt to reveal a continuous trickle of persistent upgrades, such as new characters and items purchasable while playing. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I suspect I'll continue attempting that goal when 1.0 finally hits. I'm committed for the long haul.