Game not starting at all. Works again when original game files from Steam are replaced by files from pirated copy

[♫MusicMen225♫]

Before you write anything such as "oh no, stealing games bad, why you do that" just because you saw the title - Please listen. For some reason, my game has recently refused to work. Steam tries to start it up but process for it never shows up, at least not in Windows taskbar, neither does any game window open. There are no errors or other messages, the game straight up just doesn't work. Now, here's the weird thing - I usually don't download pirated copies of the game unless I can't find those games on Steam anymore, but in this particular case, I attempted to download pirated copy of Luxor Evolved and replaced all main files, excluding Steam specific files in Steam's game directory. Wouldn't you know it, the game apparently runs now, but when I try to reinstall it or verify files integrity and bring back Steam copy, it refuses to work again. I'm confused and sad, considering I really loved Luxor Evolved, due to how unique it was compared to other Luxor games. Does any of you guys have any idea whatsoever what's wrong with it? I do not want to play cracked copy and support piracy, but it seems like I will be forced to do so to enjoy the game, even though I actually own it on Steam legally as well. Disabling Steam Cloud doesn't help either, as the game simply syncs anyway, even if I disable Steam Cloud globally, so there's no way for me to check if it's a simple save data corruption. Any help would be greatly appreciated - I'm on Windows 10 22H2 with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 and Intel Core i5-2400, in case that matters. I'm honestly out of ideas and there's nowhere a mention of an issue like this mentioned, since I did try looking this up beforehand.

Edit: After some testing, it seems that main executable of the game is at fault for some reason. I did a test where I swapped out original "luxor_ev_x86.exe" for cracked one as the only changed file, and that by itself seems to be fixing it.