Yes, there’s a really easy way, you can just grab the .deb for the package, unpack it, and stick the .so file somewhere that cataclysm will find it. This assumes you have the appropriate dependencies of the library installed.
In short, it looks like your package management won’t let you do what you want, so go around it.
Protip, if you invoke cataclysm as “LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/library ./cataclysm-tiles”, it will add /path/to/library to the linker search path, so you can stick the .so somewhere guaranteed to not cause problems, like inside the cataclysm directory.