@LPChip,
What is the "paid game" this distributes, and can I purchase it somewhere to clear my conscience/support the devs?
It's actually linked to in the readme: store
dot steampowered
dot com
slash sub
slash 64119
Five bucks is quite a steal... honestly it's probably too little, the devs are barely stumbling by since the company that stole ownership of the Chip's Challenge franchise is taking a lot of the revenue and they have to pay them just to keep it on the store. I'd recommend buying everything there for the full 10 bucks without the discount if you can (although knowing that your money is ultimately making its way to a company that's screwing over the devs like crazy might fog up your conscience even more)
Incidentally, can I ignore my antivirus program's warning that the cracked Steam API DLL is a PUP? It's probably a false positive, but you never know with pirated software. Then again, since I actually own the game on Steam, I probably wouldn't need it anyway.
The crack intercepts the game's connection to the Steam API, which is why Steam doesn't try to boot up if you launch it without Steam already open and doesn't prevent you from playing if you haven't bought the game on Steam, so that's probably what it's picking up. Virus detectors tend to be overzealous regarding that.
So this is probably obvious by now, Chip, but the fact that this is distributed using a modified steam_api.dll that bypasses Steam's ownership check might actually make it legally dubious. I'd be fine with removing the link in a few days and putting a "pm me for info" notice in its place.