🔗 Share this article I Believe I Already Have Favorite Game of 2026. Following my time with well over 200 recent games this year, I am officially closing the book on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I feel content with the final results, accepting that plenty of excellent games likely fell by the wayside. Now, there's job is to except relax, disconnect briefly, and possibly go for a pleasant stroll in the— well, shoot, found another brilliant title. So much for my intentions! An Early Favorite Surfaces With my off-hours play, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across what might become my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a classic labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of major consequence peril and prize. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it's popular, give Sol Cesto a try so you can burn a spot in your gaming budget. A Calculated Genre Subversion 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, progressing deeper and deeper in search of the sun, which has disappeared from the fantasy world. Mechanically, that makes for some recognizable genre framework. Select a character who has parameters and powers, clear floor after floor of enemies, pick up some permanent upgrades (which are teeth), and defeat a few biome bosses. Simple enough! The Novel Central System The way you truly navigate a area, is unique. Whenever you start another stage, you're shown a sixteen-square board of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To explore a room, you simply click on one of the four rows, but the exact space you select is determined by luck. You may face a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a one-in-four probability of landing on a particular space in a row. After that, the odds shift. So do you press your luck, or do you click on a different row first and aim for more cautious selections early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety on display in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating when you acquire its rhythm. Manipulating Probability The roguelike twist is that your probabilities can be influenced through a run by gathering teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. For example, you may obtain a perk that will lower your chances of landing on a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of landing on a treasure chest too. Crafting a loadout is about tweaking the numbers optimally to have a higher chance at getting your desired outcome. On a particular session, I invested my attribute improvements toward melee prowess and selected all the teeth I could that would improve my probability of landing on monsters of that variety. In another run, I constructed my hero around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters every time I claimed a reward. The customization choices are not endless, but there's enough to work with to let you manipulate numbers the way you want. An Ever-Present Risk Unsurprisingly, it remains a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have a likely outcome to select the square you want but wind up hitting on an enemy that would deplete your remaining life. Each click is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you navigate a level and determine if to keep clicking or when to move on to the next floor instead of testing fate. Tools such as explosive devices aid in reducing the chance, as do some hero powers. One hero's special power, charged after clearing four squares, allows players to select a vertical line rather than a row on a turn. Should you use your cards right, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to sidestep a dangerous choice. There's a shocking degree of depth in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking. Looking Ahead Sol Cesto is remaining in its preview phase, and it has at least one more update scheduled before the full version is launched. Another playable adventurer and a fresh guardian are planned for release by the end of January. The full launch may not be long after, but the game's developers haven't set a final date yet. A Final Thought No matter when the complete game arrives, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. For the past week, I've been completely engrossed with it, uncovering each of little secrets and banking my earned gold per attempt to unlock a steady stream of persistent upgrades, featuring additional heroes and items available for acquisition while playing. I still haven't completed the dungeon, and I have a sense I'll still be working on that task when 1.0 finally hits. Sign me up for the long haul.