Welcome to Etrom - The Astral Essence’s 20th Anniversary Edition, an immersive point and click action RPG set in a dark future where societies are not only divided by walls, but also laws, secrets, and the treacherous Void Lands.
In a dark futuristic Middle Ages, between arcane rituals, endless wars and bloody fights with techno-mystical blades, you will play the role of Etrom, a former HWD (Human World Defense) attacker who has suffered the mysterious call of the Astral Essence.
As an elite soldier turned fugitive, you must navigate through hostile cities, ancient civilizations, and otherworldly realms to uncover the truth about the enigmatic Astral Essence and your own existence. With a multitude of locations and settings, each brimming with rituals, secret-service plots, and dark spells, Etrom offers a rich and captivating world to explore.
Please Note: The game features a proprietary style of controls, so players should be prepared to familiarize themselves with a gameplay experience which was both revolutionary and controversial for its time, a truly unique way of experiencing RPG, point and click gameplay that divided the masses, and left critics reviewing the game from 2/10 to 9/10!
Engage in intense battles against hordes of enemies, from humans to monsters and extradimensional beings, fighting will be gruelling, bloody, and constant! Use a variety of spectacular Astral Powers, such as Meteor and Lightning Storm. Depending on the choices you make in game, you'll be able to unleash incredible transformations, becoming a fearsome Demon, Draconian Guardian, or an Abyssal Knight. You can also learn to pilot powerful war mechs and experience the thrill of strategic combat against formidable adversaries.
The voice of the Gods resonates in the astral worlds and you can now hear their Call. Will you have the courage to answer it and discover the secrets that lie beyond the gates of a dark reality, to follow your path of Truth and Justice?
Key Features:
20th Anniversary Edition of Etrom - The Astral Essence, first announced in 2003
Unique Proprietary Controls - Experience an alternate way of playing point and click RPGs
Includes the first episode of the novel written by Fabio Belsanti and CyberScrivens!
Seven possible endings, shaping the fate of the parallel dimension
Over 70 huge environments with a total of approximately 50 hours of gameplay
Pilot powerful war mechs and engage in strategic battles
Discover secrets and unravel the mysteries of ancient civilizations
Encounter demons, secret divinities, dragons, and intelligent entities
Over 500 types of weapons, armor, rings, magic amulets, and more
First-person sniper mode for precise targeting and deadly accuracy
To Those Struggling to Run Etrom on their Machine:
If you are having issues playing Etrom on your machine, the community has recommended you run the game with DgVoodoo2, a set of implementation of old graphics APIs. Please Search for DgVoodoo2 online!
We hope you continue to buy and play Etrom, even 20 years after its original release, and hope to one day, together with you, fund its porting to a newer engine, or even create something new!
If you have any doubts or questions, take a look at the community posts on Steam, there's a lot of information from other players that may help you on your way.
Developer’s Technical Note:
We regret to share that bugs and system crashes, both during game launch and during gameplay, can happen on some hardware and software configurations.
In our last internal playtests in October 2024, 20 years after the game’s launch, we have found that the situation has drastically improved with the newest Windows 11 update 24H2.
Prior to this, in our 2023 testing, at least one incidence of major bugs and/or crashes on approximately 30% of PCs running windows 10 and 11 operating systems. This can at times be resolved by following the guide above. If it persists, please request a refund within 2 hours of gameplay, as unfortunately the game may continue to crash for you - though as we say, the latest Windows updates have made things much much better!
Etrom was first developed by a group of young dreamers from southern Italy who, mad as they were, decided to begin by creating a proprietary engine, which they then used to develop the game. The game, made by AgeofGames (known at the time as PMStudios Italia) should therefore be considered an Artifact, a piece of the Independent Videogame Archeology from the beginning of the millennium. The proprietary engine, developed by a single programmer, was imperfect back then, and likewise right now, as hardware configurations have swiftly evolved.
Players should also note that the game cannot be saved until the first level is completed. The first level takes between 15 to 45 minutes to complete, depending on skill and the amount of each player’s interaction with the enemies in the map.
Some antivirus systems may also block the game altogether. Not being able to update the code in the engine in any way, we will not be able to solve the problems that will be reported to us.
One thing we did manage to fix was the English dialogue (only dialogue not Etrom’s journal unfortunately), which has been overhauled by the award winning science fiction writers of the CyberScrivens collective.
We have decided to republish Etrom at a symbolic price despite all these problems because we believe that the setting and the overall narrative structures of the project are still very valid and fascinating today and we hope, also thanks to the addition of a free extract of the novel, that new and old players can immerse themselves for a few hours in this parallel universe that we want to be able to expand in the future with modern technology and development programs.
