The takeover of Vienna studio Linden Forge has uncovered a hidden feature that gave favoured teams extra clues in its popular esports game, the new owner said on Friday. More than 38,000 match replays show that selected players received a route marker unavailable to opponents, according to the company, which says the system operated for nearly two years.
The game, Night Ledger, has paid out €4.2 million (about $4.9 million) in tournament prizes and promotional bonuses since 2024. Its next major event, scheduled for Vienna on 14 November, has been paused while organisers review past results. Silver Lark Interactive completed its purchase of Linden Forge on 21 October.
How the hidden cue worked
Night Ledger is a five-versus-one pursuit game whose story campaign follows a detective tracking a fictional 1970s murderer called Theodore Bannon. In its competitive mode, one player hides while a team of investigators searches a shifting map. The concealed “ghost route” gave chosen teams a faint directional cue towards the hiding player, according to Silver Lark.
The cue did not appear on opponents’ screens or in the published tournament rules. Silver Lark said it found the feature while rebuilding the game after the purchase, then compared server replays with the version players saw. In 4,306 tournament and qualifying matches, 19 teams received the cue; 17 had promotional partnerships with Linden Forge.
We won the final, but now I have to ask whether we ever got a fair game.
Alex Orozco, Night Ledger competitor
Finals under a cloud
Orozco, who competed in the 2025 Alpine Crown final, said players had complained for months that some opponents seemed to find hiding places “too quickly”. He said the accusations were dismissed as frustration after losses. Silver Lark has offered players access to their own replay files and says it will publish a match-by-match list of affected events next week.
The company estimates that at least €860,000 in prize payments and bonuses went to teams that received the cue. It has frozen €1.1 million set aside for the November event and promised to put the money into a revised competition, with eligibility rules to be agreed with players. Silver Lark has not said whether it will seek repayment from teams.
Mátyás Takács, a former Linden Forge gameplay designer, said the cue was introduced as a “spectator-friendly assist” during development and later restricted to selected events. He said he objected when it was kept out of the rules, but did not know how many teams received it. “Players should have been told what the game was doing,” he said.
Maiken A. Bech, a Vienna-based esports governance researcher, said the replay release could help organisers judge whether results were distorted, but warned that the advantage might not translate neatly into a win in every match. Silver Lark says it has removed the feature from a test version and will invite players to check the revised rules before competition resumes.
For Orozco, the pause offers a chance to settle the argument in public rather than let suspicion linger over every close finish. The tournament’s organisers say they expect to announce a new schedule by 6 November. Until then, the game’s most celebrated competitors are waiting for a rematch under rules they can see.
