🔗 Share this article I Believe My First Must-Play Title of 2026. Following my time with in excess of 200 recent games this year, I am officially closing the book on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I feel content with the concluding selections, despite being aware plenty of excellent games likely fell by the wayside. Now, there's plan is to except relax, take a short break, and possibly go for a nice walk in the— oh no, found another great game. And just like that, goodbye to my plans! A Premature Contender Emerges During my off-hours play, typically earmarked for a selection of unusual games, I've come across what could be my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a classic labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of major consequence risk and reward. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you enjoy in knowing about a game before it's popular, test out Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your wallet for unique titles. A Tactical Roguelike Twist Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's a departure from all I've ever played. The premise is that you need to explore a dungeon, going down level by level to find the sun, which has disappeared from its world. In practice, that makes for some recognizable genre framework. Select a character with their own attributes and skills, clear floor after floor of enemies, collect some passive buffs (represented as teeth), and defeat a few biome bosses. Easy to grasp! The Unique Core Mechanic How you effectively complete a chamber, however. Whenever you begin a fresh level, you're shown a 4x4 grid of boxes. Each square holds a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To make a move, you simply click on one of the four rows, but the specific tile you select is up to chance. You might see a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You start with a one-in-four probability of selecting a particular space in a row. Then, you'll probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you opt on a alternative option first and aim for safer moves early? That's the risk-reward dynamic at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get its rhythm. Shaping the Odds The roguelike twist is that your odds can be manipulated during an attempt by picking up teeth that alter which objects you're more attracted to. For example, you could acquire a perk that will decrease your odds of encountering a trap, but will also decrease the odds of landing on a treasure chest too. Creating a build is about influencing the statistics as best you can to have a better shot at landing where you want. On a particular session, I put all my attribute improvements toward melee prowess and selected all the teeth I could that would boost my chances of attracting me toward monsters of that variety. In another run, I constructed my hero around reward boxes and combined that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters whenever I secured loot. The customization choices are not endless, but they are sufficient to work with to allow you to tweak probabilities to your preference. A Persistent Gamble Of course, it's still a game of chance. There remains the chance that you have an 80% chance to land on the desired tile but wind up hitting a monster that would eliminate your remaining life. Each click is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you work through a stage and choose whether to continue selecting or to proceed to the subsequent stage instead of risking it all. Items like explosive devices help cut down the chance, as do some special skills. An adventurer's unique ability, powered up by making four moves, allows players to click on a column instead of a horizontal row during that action. Should you use this strategically, you can save that move for a crucial point to sidestep a dangerous choice. It's a surprising level of strategy in the basic action of clicking. The Road to 1.0 Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has a final update planned until the complete edition is launched. An additional hero and a new boss are expected to drop by the end of January. The 1.0 release may not be much later, but the game's developers 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've been positively obsessed with it, finding all of small details and banking my earned gold per attempt to reveal a continuous trickle of persistent upgrades, such as fresh adventurers and items purchasable mid-attempt. I still haven't completed the dungeon, and I have a sense I'll continue working on that task when 1.0 finally hits. Sign me up for the long haul.