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Animal Well is the project that is associated with videogamedunkey. I will give it a shot for that reason.
I was hyped for Animal Well before it got picked up by Big Mode, but the signal boost it's gotten has me excited that it'll be a big thing for a few weeks. This kind of game doesn't often go viral.
If you want something similar in the meantime, I highly recommend Knytt Underground, Rain World, or Gato Roboto. Or check out Within A Deep Forest for free.
Server-side encryption maybe?
The stored encryption keys are assembled by finding secrets in the game. The hope is that people will find the secrets by playing the game faster than it can be assembled via data mining, thus players actually playing will do the discovery.
Hopefully it works; once someone does it the cat’s out of the bag anyway; the attempt here is to make it genuine.
Depending on how the secrets are conveyed to the player, they may be completely impossible to data mine
I suspect a sufficiently well trained reverse engineer could figure out how the keys are being generated, and crack it. It will surely be interesting one way or another.
Sounds like an elaborate crackme.