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

After playing in excess of 200 new releases this year, I am officially turning the page on 2025. My year-end list is live, and I'm satisfied with the concluding selections, accepting that numerous excellent games likely fell under the radar. At this point, it's job is to but sit back, disconnect briefly, and possibly go for a pleasant stroll in the— ah crap, found another brilliant title. And just like that, goodbye to my intentions!

An Early Front-Runner Appears

With my off-hours play, often set aside for a handful of quirky titles, I've discovered what might become my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a traditional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of significant risk peril and prize. Consider this a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it's popular, give Sol Cesto a try so you can make a dent in your indie credit card.

A Strategic Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's different from everything I've previously experienced. The concept is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper on a quest for the sun, which has disappeared from the fantasy world. In practice, this results in some familiar roguelike structure. Select a character who has attributes and skills, clear floor after floor of foes, pick up some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and overcome a few biome bosses. Easy to grasp!

The Distinctive Central System

The way you truly navigate a chamber, is unique. Whenever you enter a new floor, you see a 4x4 grid of boxes. Each square holds a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To make a move, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you select is up to chance.

You could encounter a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You start with a quarter likelihood of landing on any given square in a row.

Then, you'll chances are recalculated. So do you take the risk, or do you choose on a safer line first and aim for safer moves early? That's the tension between chance and safety on display in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing after you develop a feel for it.

Manipulating Probability

The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped through a run by picking up teeth that change what things you're more attracted to. As an instance, you could acquire a perk that will decrease your odds of hitting a trap, but will also decrease the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Creating a build is about manipulating math as best you can to have a improved likelihood at getting your desired outcome.
• On a particular session, I invested my stat upgrades toward brute force and selected all the teeth I could that would increase my odds of attracting me toward monsters of that variety.
• During a separate session, I constructed my hero around reward boxes and combined that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies each time I secured loot.

The build options are limited, but they are sufficient to experiment with to let you manipulate probabilities according to your strategy.

A Persistent Tension

Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There remains the risk that you have a likely outcome to land on the square you want but ultimately choose a monster that would take out your remaining life. Every move is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you clear a floor out and choose whether to press onward or to advance to the subsequent stage rather than testing fate.

Items like destructive ordnance aid in reducing the chance, similar to some hero powers. One hero's signature move, powered up by making four moves, enables you to click on a vertical line in place of a horizontal row for that move. If you play your cards right, you can save that move for the right moment to avoid a risky decision. There's a shocking level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has a final update scheduled before the final game is launched. Another playable adventurer and a fresh guardian are scheduled to arrive sometime in January. The official version may not be far behind, but the creators haven't set a concrete launch day yet.

A Parting Endorsement

Whenever the complete game arrives, you ought to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I have been positively obsessed with it, discovering its hidden nuances and saving my accumulated currency per attempt to reveal a continuous trickle of permanent unlocks, featuring additional heroes and items purchasable during a run. To this day, I have not reached the bottom, and I have a sense I'll still be working on that task when 1.0 finally hits. Count me in for the long haul.