Yep, he could have done that, maybe he was afraid of losing his backers on patreon or something...
Invested a lot of money on encrypting the game, went out of his way to sue old modder who had a working patch on his patreon. And current state of game is half-dead. Although I loved this game in it's early days it's shiny has long been lost.
Anyway... step by step from scratch.
Assuming you already have node installed.
That's all. Game will be decrypted and patched at this point.
Also make sure to properly extract files.
By that I mean either opening the compressed file and drag'n'drop in the game folder or moving the compressed file to the main game folder, right clicking on it and selecting extract here.
Extract to...
or
Extract as
will always created another folder with extracted stuff inside and that is not what we want.
Hope this helps.