Rather than any one game, this Steam Next Fest, Valve's latest game demo extravaganza, has been dominated by generative AI and discussions around it. A record 8,000 demos, many of them plainly or proudly marked by AI, have made it more difficult for game developers to cut through.
If previous Steam Next Fests were noisy, this one is cacophonous. But there are, as ever, plenty of promising games coming out and coming up. To that list of games, let's add Probably Stolen, a job sim that feels named for the times and is, in part, a game about how to "stop rampant AI" in a cyberpunk city. At the time of writing, it's also the biggest single-player demo on Valve's SNF charts.
If you told me that I would wake up tomorrow as an NPC in CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077, I would probably spend the rest of my day playing Probably Stolen to get some practice in. "Craft, trade, and smuggle goods of questionable origin, navigate faction loyalties, and stop rampant AI by killing those it controls," developer Questing Goose Studio says of the game's demo. (The publisher is tinyBuild, which is on a record run including the likes of Graveyard Keeper 2 and ReStory: Chill Electronics Repairs, another shop sim.)
I would call this a shopkeeper sim with a shot of Papers, Please, the still-talked-about immigration desk sim from designer Lucas Pope that challenged players to filter out perceived threats to their motherland. In Probably Stolen, we're told, "You never really know who’s on the other side of the counter. Today’s customer could be a security fisher for evidence, a revolutionary seeking leverage, or a fallen elite testing your usefulness. Every sale is a gamble. Approve it, refuse it, report it, or look away; someone is always taking notes."
Where many shopkeep sims lean into the coziness of existing in the margins of a fantasy world, passively becoming a pivotal part of 1,000 stories by stocking bright-eyed adventurers and so on, Probably Stolen looks granular and gritty, and proudly endorses crime. "You can cut the product’s quality, relabel counterfeit products as genuine, or fence discounted, stolen goods if you believe Security won’t reach you," its Steam description adds.
You've got rent to pay, laws to ignore, clients to fleece, and police to avoid. You've also got a shotgun close by, because you never know when a synthetic human, part of a legion overseen by "a sentient AI chip," will roll into the shop.
A quick run of the demo proves that there's an RPG somewhere in this game's family tree. Your starter perks and specialization affect the options available to you. A Rat Wrangler, for example, can raise rats for meat. Lovely. Organ Dealers get an organ storage container and blood transfusion set. Gunsmiths start with guns, mods, and ammunition in stock.
With 10 specializations and a neutral Apprentice option (more starting cash and some default household goods and food), your shop could look pretty different between playthroughs. That's before we get to 25 perks like nighttime robbery prevention, faction reputation bonuses, and counterbalancing negative perks like increased rent or a smaller base inventory. On my first day, my kind mentor warned me of the risk of robberies, so I can already see one of those perks being useful.
The demo for Probably Stolen currently has exactly 2,000 user reviews sitting at 98% positive. My first run – rich pixel art, snappy interface, and immediate stakes – had me so quickly and thoroughly hooked that I missed meeting reminders from my boss, so you can put me in the positive camp. Probably Stolen is out in full on October 28.
