I'm Convinced I Already Have Favorite Game of 2026.
Having experienced well over 200 new releases this year, I am officially closing the book on 2025. My year-end list is out in the world, and I'm satisfied with the ultimate rankings, even knowing plenty of fantastic releases likely fell under the radar. At this point, it's nothing for me to do but sit back, take a short break, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— oh no, stumbled upon a brilliant title. So much for my peaceful respite!
An Early Front-Runner Appears
During my off-hours play, often set aside for a selection of unusual games, I've discovered potentially my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a conventional dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of major consequence risk and reward. Consider this a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride discovering a game before it hits the mainstream, test out Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your gaming budget.
A Tactical Genre Subversion
Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's unlike anything I'm familiar with. The setup is that you need to explore a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has disappeared from its world. When you play, that makes for some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer with their own stats and abilities, clear floor after floor of monsters, pick up some permanent upgrades (in the form of teeth), and defeat a few biome bosses. Straightforward, right!
The Distinctive Central System
The way you effectively complete a dungeon room, though. Whenever you start another stage, you see a sixteen-square board of boxes. Each square features a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To proceed, you choose on one of the four rows, but the specific tile you end up on is a matter of probability.
You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You start with a one-in-four probability of landing on a specific tile in a row.
Then, you'll chances are recalculated. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you opt on a different row first and attempt some safer moves early? Herein lies the risk-reward dynamic at play in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing when you acquire its rhythm.
Influencing Chance
The procedural hook is that your odds can be manipulated over the course of a session by collecting teeth that modify the types of squares you're more attracted to. To illustrate, you may obtain a perk that will lower your chances of hitting a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of getting a treasure chest too.
- Developing a strategy is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a improved likelihood at landing where you want.
- During one attempt, I invested my attribute improvements toward brute force and chose every teeth I could that would increase my odds of being drawn to monsters aligned with that strength.
- In another run, I built my character around reward boxes and paired that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters each time I claimed a reward.
The customization choices are limited, but it provides ample to work with to let you manipulate numbers according to your strategy.
A Constant Risk
Of course, it's still a game of chance. You constantly face the possibility that you have a likely outcome to select the desired tile but ultimately choose a foe that would deplete your remaining life. All selections is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you work through a stage and choose whether to keep clicking or when to move on to the following level instead of pushing your luck.
Tools such as explosive devices help cut down the chance, similar to some special skills. A particular character's unique ability, powered up by making four moves, lets gamers to select a vertical column rather than a horizontal row for that move. If you play this move wisely, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. It's a surprising degree of depth in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.
Future Development
Sol Cesto is still in development, and it has a final update scheduled until the final game is released. A new character and a fresh guardian are planned for release sometime in January. The full launch probably isn't long after, but the game's developers haven't committed to a specific release window yet.
A Concluding Thought
Whenever the complete game arrives, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your radar. For the past week, I've been thoroughly captivated with it, discovering its small details and storing my run rewards per attempt to unlock a steady stream of permanent unlocks, featuring new characters and items purchasable during a run. I still haven't completed the dungeon, and I have a sense I will remain pursuing that objective when 1.0 finally hits. Sign me up for the complete journey.
