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Moirai, an experimental indie game on Steam, has been closed down forever due to hackers

Moirai

You might not have heard about Moirai – a free Steam indie game with a super interesting concept – but now you’ll never be able to play it, even if you wanted to. That’s because the small team of creators behind it have been forced to shut it down.

For more small studio goodness, check out our list of the best indie games

As Waypoint point out, it’s a shame because the game was unique. You played it thinking it was a single-player experience, only to find out at the end that it contains multiplayer components.

Since it’s no longer playable and locks players at the title screen, I’ll give you the abridged version. You wander through a cave, looking for a missing person. Eventually you come upon a bloodied character and you have the choice of killing them or letting them pass. After exploring some more, you eventually go to leave, only now you’re covered in blood. You come across another character and the game ends with you in the position of the character whose fate was just in your hands.

If you input your email address, the game tells you your fate when the next player entered the cave, and this carried on for the entire four years it was free on Steam. But now the devs have announced their decision to close the game on Steam.

“I thought I’d do a short writeup to say that Moirai will no longer be available to play through. We’ve updated the game build so that it locks players at the title screen,” the devs say. “We’re a small team consisting of an artist, composer and programmer. We all work full time jobs outside of games and have many additional commitments beyond our jobs. We’re not commercial indie game developers making a living off our work. The exciting thing about that is we can work on little experiments like Moirai that are free from commercial constraints.”

Unfortunately, the game is costing them to keep up, and they don’t have the resources to combat hackers who are ruining the game experience. No details have been compromised, fortunately.

“Since launching on Steam our database has received several attacks,” they continue. “We’ve worked hard (and sometimes with supportive community members) to update our system to a more manageable state and minimise the likelihood of attacks. However recently our database was under a repeatable attack that ruined the game experience for a few players and resulted in it going offline. It’s important that you know that no email data was compromised in this attack. However this vulnerability means that we are subject to future attacks. We’re not a large studio and we don’t have the resources to properly prevent against these attacks so we’re going to pull the game from the store.”