🔗 Share this article I'm Convinced I've Already Found Must-Play Title of 2026. Having experienced well over 200 recent games this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is published, and I'm satisfied with the ultimate rankings, even knowing numerous stellar titles probably slipped under the radar. Now, there's nothing for me to do but sit back, take a short break, and possibly go for a nice walk in the— oh no, discovered one more amazing experience. And just like that, goodbye to my intentions! A Surprising Contender Emerges With my casual gaming time, often set aside for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across what could be my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a conventional dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of high stakes danger and payoff. Take this as a hipster's insider tip: If you relish discovering a game before it hits the mainstream, test out 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 different from everything I'm familiar with. The setup is that you need to explore a dungeon, going down level by level in search of the sun, which has vanished from its world. In practice, this results in some familiar roguelike structure. Pick a hero with their own attributes and skills, fight through each level of enemies, collect some permanent upgrades (in the form of teeth), and overcome a few biome bosses. Easy to grasp! The Novel Central System The way you actually clear a chamber, is unique. Whenever you begin a fresh level, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. All spaces either contains a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To explore a room, you choose 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 reward box in it. You begin with a 25% chance of hitting a specific tile in a row. Subsequently, your probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you opt on a alternative option first and try to make safer moves early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety on display in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing when you acquire its rhythm. Shaping the Odds The procedural hook is that your odds can be manipulated over the course of a session by gathering teeth that modify the types of squares you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you may obtain a perk that will lower your chances of hitting a trap, but will also decrease the odds of getting a treasure chest too. Developing a strategy is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a better shot at getting your desired outcome. During one attempt, I invested my power boosts toward melee prowess and picked as many teeth I could that would increase my odds of landing on monsters of that variety. On a different attempt, I built my character around reward boxes and combined that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes whenever I opened a chest. The customization choices are not endless, but there's enough to engage with to allow you to tweak numbers the way you want. An Ever-Present Gamble Unsurprisingly, it remains a game of chance. There remains the risk that you have a high probability to hit the desired tile but end up landing a foe that would eliminate your remaining life. All selections is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you work through a stage and determine if to keep clicking or when to move on to the subsequent stage as opposed to risking it all. Items like explosive devices aid in reducing the chance, just like some character abilities. An adventurer's signature move, powered up by selecting four tiles, enables you to select a column instead of a row for that move. Should you use this strategically, you can reserve that option for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. It's a surprising level of strategy in the simple act of clicking. Future Development Sol Cesto is remaining in development, and it has another update to go until the full version is unleashed. A new character and a new boss are scheduled to arrive sometime in January. The full launch likely won't be long after, but the game's developers haven't announced a final date yet. A Final Recommendation Whenever the complete game arrives, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I have been thoroughly captivated with it, discovering its little secrets and banking my earned gold in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of permanent unlocks, including new characters and items available for acquisition while playing. To this day, I have not reached the bottom, and I suspect I'll still be working on that task when the official release drops. Count me in for the complete journey.