THE DARK SIDE OF CECLON

I have a soft spot for games that exist purely because one person refused to stop building them, and The Dark Side of Ceclon is exactly that kind of project. Alexandre Huger, working under the SOLIDS Studio banner while holding down a day job in the games industry, spent four years constructing a third-person open-world survival RPG set on the sun-scorched planet CECLON. That origin story sets expectations correctly: this is not a polished blockbuster, but it carries a handmade conviction that big-budget titles rarely bother with. You play as Jensen, the only survivor of a shuttle crash on CECLON's arid surface. The goal is deceptively straightforward: recover Veka energy, figure out what happened to the prior expedition, and somehow get off this rock alive. The world is split between surface and underground exploration, and getting around is handled through a vehicle called the Wallpass, though you will need to climb out of it every time you want to gather resources, which does blunt the pace of traversal more than it should. Combat runs through a battle drone that shoots lasers, upgradable via an RPG progression system where you spend points across different stats and learn new skills. The Nocturnes, CECLON's hostile native creatures, come in multiple classes with distinct behaviors, and the primordial boss variants give the combat loop some genuine stakes. A full day-night cycle governs the tension: daylight is for exploring and crafting, and nightfall signals the Nocturnes to come hunting. Three difficulty settings and three separate endings give the game meaningful replay hooks that most solo-dev projects simply skip. The friction points are real. Narrative delivery leans on dense text info-dumps that can feel illegible, making it easy to lose track of why you are doing what you are doing at any given moment. The HUD and minimap are on the bulky side, and the drone-centric combat, while serviceable, does not have the kinetic punch the setting seems to promise. Community feedback has also flagged limited key-rebinding options, which matters for players who do not default to WASD. These are the rough seams you expect from a solo build, but they are worth naming plainly. What earns The Dark Side of Ceclon genuine goodwill is the scale of what one developer actually shipped. A sizeable open world, an underground layer to explore, boss encounters, crafting, RPG progression, a day-night system that meaningfully changes how you play, branching endings. The Steam community sits at a positive rating across its early reviews, which for a title this small and this unmarketed is quietly remarkable. The Pitch Black mood is there in the atmosphere, the sci-fi lore is earnest if dense, and the ambition of the whole project lands with a weight you notice. If you have patience for handcraft over polish, and you want to see what a single committed person can build in four years, CECLON has something real to offer.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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