Grim Dawn

Grim Dawn is an action role-playing game developed by Crate Entertainment. Crate Entertainment announced on July 27, 2009 that they had licensed the Titan Quest engine from Iron Lore and announced Grim Dawn's development on January 21, 2010 Initially, few details were revealed, with Crate Entertainment simply stating that Grim Dawn is set in a thematically-dark fictional world loosely based on the Victorian era. Subsequently through Crate's official forums, more information about the game has slowly been revealed.

Plot

The game takes place in Cairn, a dark, war-torn world where a once proud empire has been brought to ruin and the human race driven to the edge of extinction. Cairn has become ground zero of an eternal war between two otherworldly powers, the Aetherials and Chthonians, one seeking to use human bodies as a resource, the other intent upon destroying the human race before that can happen.

Humans had come into communication with extra-dimensional beings. They learned things from the whisperings of these otherworldly entities and eventually attempted to open a portal to bring one across. Naturally, being paranoid of the unknown as humans often are, they also devised a way to imprison it once it came through. Through experimentation, they learned that these beings, made of aether, a sort of spiritual energy, could fuse themselves with the human mind, possessing and controlling their host if they were able to subvert the human's will. The researchers discovered that a human, once possessed, retained heightened abilities after the aetherial being was purged from them. Naturally, this research got out of control as such things always do. The researchers brought over more aetherials, they got loose, the aetherials were able to then open more portals into their own world, bringing over large numbers of their brethren.