🔗 Share this article I Believe I Already Have Must-Play Title of 2026. Following my time with well over 200 recent games this year, I am officially turning the page on 2025. My best-of compilation is out in the world, and I am at peace with the final results, despite being aware numerous fantastic releases probably slipped through the cracks. Currently, my only nothing for me to do other than unwind, unplug a little, and possibly go for a pleasant stroll in the— oh no, stumbled upon a brilliant title. So much for my intentions! A Surprising Front-Runner Appears During my laid-back sessions, typically earmarked for a few oddball curiosities, I've discovered what could be my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a conventional labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of significant risk danger and payoff. View this a preview for the in-the-know: If you take pride being aware of a game before it's cool, give Sol Cesto a try so you can make a dent in your indie credit card. A Tactical Roguelike Twist Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's a departure from all I've ever played. The concept is that you must venture into a dungeon, going down level by level in search of the sun, which has vanished from this mythical realm. In practice, that makes for some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer who has parameters and powers, fight through each level of foes, pick up some passive buffs (represented as teeth), and defeat a few stage-ending champions. Easy to grasp! The Novel Central System How you effectively complete a chamber, however. Every time you enter a new floor, you're shown a 4x4 grid of boxes. Every tile either contains a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To make a move, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the specific tile you select is a matter of probability. You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You initially will have a one-in-four probability of hitting any given square in a row. After that, the probabilities change. So do you press your luck, or do you choose on a alternative option first and aim for more cautious selections early? Herein lies the risk-reward dynamic in action in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get an understanding of it. Influencing Chance The roguelike twist is that your probabilities can be influenced through a run by collecting teeth that modify the types of squares you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you could acquire a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of finding a reward too. Crafting a loadout is about influencing the statistics optimally to have a better shot at landing where you want. During one attempt, I put all my stat upgrades toward melee prowess and chose every teeth I could that would increase my odds of being drawn to monsters of that variety. During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would debuff nearby foes whenever I secured loot. The customization choices are not endless, but it provides ample to experiment with to enable you to influence numbers the way you want. A Persistent Risk Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. You constantly face the risk that you have a likely outcome to land on the desired tile but end up landing a foe that would take out your remaining life. Every move is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you work through a stage and determine if to press onward or to proceed to the following level as opposed to testing fate. Items like enemy-killing bombs aid in reducing the chance, similar to some special skills. An adventurer's special power, charged after clearing four squares, allows players to click on a vertical line instead of a row for that move. If you play this strategically, you can save that move for a crucial point to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising degree of depth in the simple act of clicking. Looking Ahead Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has at least one more update to go until the final game is unleashed. An additional hero and a new boss are expected to drop before the conclusion of January. The 1.0 release may not be much later, but the studio haven't announced a concrete launch day yet. A Parting Recommendation Whenever the complete game arrives, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I have been completely engrossed with it, finding all of small details and saving my accumulated currency every session to reveal a continuous trickle of permanent unlocks, such as new characters and items purchasable while playing. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I get the feeling I'll still be working on that task when the full version launches. Count me in for the long haul.