Ah, you mean back when the Dev was letting everyone play on their server? Yeah, the free AI token tends to draw in a high retention rate. Turns out talking to AI NPC is a bit popular and the player base got bigger. A bit too big. To the point where it wasn't sustainable to keep running it for so many people. What that means is likely it's too expensive to continuously pay for everyone. OpenRouter was the option for those who still wanted to play, but couldn't afford the cost of a new GPU. Personally, I run local on my puny 6GB GPU, and barely get by with 20 - 40 second wait times. But I've considered OpenRouter several times.
While the extra cost sucks, it's not that much if you find the right models, preferably with high Roleplay Rankings. Last I checked OpenRouter, this DeepSeek model was what everyone was using at the time. Based off a Dev response about half a year ago, you could sink $10 to cover 7,000 turns of dialog. $20 or $25 would probably cover you for 15,000 turns. You'd probably go a whole year with that. But I think this version looks even cheaper. $0.0677 cents is a crazy good deal, even when the deal ends, $0.1234 is still good and it's better at roleplay then it's older version. You'd probably get 28,000 dialog turns with $10 and then 14,000 after the deal ends.
But if you're really down bad and refuse to spend anymore money, then you could go to KoboldAI Lite and try remaking an NPC from the game to talk to there. I'm sure someone on the unoffical Discord server can direct you to find the dialog image, personality tags, and character descriptions for you to make a character card of the NPC.