The Dark Side of Ceclon review for PC

Seeing as The Dark Side of Ceclon is the creation of a one-person studio, I’m inclined to be pretty lenient towards it. After all, it’s an ambitious open-world RPG where you’re trying to survive on a (mostly) desolate planet that more-or-less does what it sets out to do. It works and it’s playable, which, all things considered, is more than can be said about lots of other one-person passion projects.

But seeing as it’s being sold for money, grading the game on a curve only goes so far. As much as I’d like to say it’s a fantastic game that unconditionally deserves support, the reality is that it’s flawed in quite a few ways that make buying it a slightly iffy proposition.

The biggest problem with the game is that it’s never totally clear what you’re doing, or why you’re doing it. While a lot of it will feel second nature if you’re ever played literally any other third-person action game, too much of the story is told via info dumps relayed in small, somewhat illegible text and narrated by AI voice actors speaking dialogue that reads like it was written by someone who only has a moderate familiarity with the English language. To be fair, given that the developer appears to be based in France based on his LinkedIn, the game probably was written by someone who only has a moderate familiarity with the English language, so I don’t want to be too harsh on that – but even if the language were perfect, there’d still be the issue that the game basically expects you to know what to do.

Mind you, because The Dark Side of Ceclon sticks so closely to what you’d expect from a third-person action game, it’s not exactly hard to figure out what to do. You drive around, looking for the game’s minimap to point you in a direction, and you gather resources. Annoyingly, you need to get out of your vehicle to gather anything which really slows down traversal, but all in all it’s not impossible to get a vague sense of where you need to go or what you need to do.

My other qualm with The Dark Side of Ceclon is that its combat is a little lacking. The game has day-night cycles (again, an impressive feature for a one-person studio), and the moment night comes, you’ll find yourself attacked by monsters. As much as I always love fighting space monsters, here it’s a little less fun, since your main weapon is a little drone that shoots lasers. While that works in one-on-one battles, it’s a lot less effective when you’re being chased by a pack of space monsters, and you’ll probably end up dead if you suffer the misfortune of being stuck outside at night.

But even with those flaws, I can’t say that The Dark Side of Ceclon is without its charms. It features a pretty sizeable map and a world that seems like it’s worth exploring, even if you’re never fully clear on what you’re looking for other than a way off the planet. I wouldn’t say it’s a must-play game, but it shows promise, and from a tiny indie studio, that’s something worthwhile.

SOLIDS Studio provided us with a Dark Side of Ceclon PC code for review purposes.