I Think My First Top Pick of 2026.
Following my time with in excess of 200 new releases this year, I'm formally turning the page on 2025. My best-of compilation is out in the world, and I'm satisfied with the final results, even knowing plenty of excellent games may have dropped under the radar. At this point, it's job is to except relax, disconnect briefly, and possibly go for a pleasant stroll in the— well, shoot, stumbled upon a great game. There go my peaceful respite!
An Early Contender Emerges
With my laid-back sessions, usually reserved for a selection of unusual games, I've discovered potentially my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a classic dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of significant risk danger and payoff. Take this as a hipster's insider tip: If you relish being aware of a game before it's popular, sample Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your wallet for unique titles.
A Strategic Genre Subversion
Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's unlike anything I've previously experienced. The concept is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, descending floor after floor to find the sun, which has vanished from the fantasy world. In practice, that makes for some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer who has attributes and skills, fight through each level of monsters, acquire some passive buffs (represented as teeth), and overcome a few biome bosses. Easy to grasp!
The Novel Central System
How you actually clear a area, is unique. Whenever you start another stage, you see a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Every tile holds a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To make a move, you just select on one of the four rows, but the exact space you select is up to chance.
You might see a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a quarter likelihood of selecting any given square in a row.
Subsequently, your odds shift. So do you take the risk, or do you choose 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 engrossing when you acquire an understanding of it.
Shaping the Odds
The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by gathering teeth that modify the types of squares you're more attracted to. To illustrate, you may obtain a perk that will reduce the probability of hitting a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of getting a treasure chest too.
- Developing a strategy is about manipulating math optimally to have a higher chance 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 improve my probability of being drawn to monsters aligned with that strength.
- In another run, I built my character around reward boxes and combined that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies every time I secured loot.
The customization choices are limited, but there's enough to work with to enable you to influence numbers to your preference.
An Ever-Present Risk
Unsurprisingly, it's still a game of chance. There remains the chance that you have a likely outcome to hit the square you want but wind up hitting on an enemy that would deplete your remaining life. Every move is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you navigate a level and choose whether to press onward or when to move on to the following level instead of risking it all.
Items like destructive ordnance assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some special skills. An adventurer's special power, charged after selecting four tiles, allows players to select a vertical column in place of a horizontal row during that action. Should you use your cards right, you can reserve that option for the right moment to circumvent a perilous selection. There's a shocking amount of nuance in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.
Looking Ahead
Sol Cesto is remaining in development, and it has at least one more update scheduled until the complete edition is launched. A new character and a fresh guardian are expected to drop sometime in January. The full launch probably isn't far behind, but the studio haven't committed to a final date yet.
A Concluding Recommendation
No matter when its 1.0 launch occurs, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your radar. I've been positively obsessed with it, finding all of little secrets and saving my accumulated currency per attempt to access a constant flow of persistent upgrades, featuring new characters and items available for acquisition mid-attempt. As of now, I am yet to reached the bottom, and I have a sense I will remain attempting that goal when the full version launches. Sign me up for the complete journey.
