Questing Goose Studio’s upcoming shopkeeper sim, Probably Stolen – Cyberpunk Shopkeeper Sim, is Papers, Please set in an intergalactic cyberpunk world.
Craft, trade, and smuggle goods of questionable origin, navigate faction loyalties, and stop rampant AI by killing those it controls. Earn enough to buy out your shop before rising rent forces your hand. Get ready for a brilliantly stressful moral minefield wrapped in neon-soaked pixel art.
Probably Stolen is coming out on October 28, and as of the time of writing, there’s a demo out now on Steam. If you’re looking for your shop management sim with a dash of suspicion and a whole lot of tension, then this game might earn a spot on your wishlist.
What Is Probably Stolen?
In a towering space station split by wealth and corruption, your business runs on merchandise with flexible origins. You’re a former scavenger who secured a storefront thanks to a generous loan and questionable timing. Now rent is rising, factions are watching, and most of your best margins live in legal grey zones.
You don’t own the shop you’re running. You’re renting it. And your landlord raises the price every single week. Your job is simple in theory: buy low, sell high, and make enough profit to eventually buy the shop outright before the rent crushes you. Fall short by a week, and the consequences could be more dire than just you being evicted. Much like real life.
Make difficult choices every day. Play it cautiously or invest in expensive merchandise, hoping for a strong return. But if that item gets confiscated, fails inspection, or simply doesn’t sell, you may not have enough left to cover what you owe. Every purchase becomes a calculation. Every risk carries weight.
Appraise, Haggle And Pray
You never really know who’s on the other side of the counter in Probably Stolen. Today’s customer could be a security fisher for evidence, a revolutionary seeking leverage, or a fallen elite testing your usefulness. That nervous-looking kid selling a “gently used” augment chip? Could be legitimate. Could be stolen. Could be a Security plant testing whether you’re willing to look the other way. Every sale is a gamble.
Approve it, refuse it, report it, or look away; someone is always taking notes. Reputation buys access and protection, but it also paints a target on your back. On this station, every client is a potential profit and a potential trouble.
You’ve got four options with every transaction: Approve, Refuse, Report, or Look Away. Each choice affects your standing with the station’s factions—Security, the Revolution, the Lower Levels, and more. There’s no purely “good” path here. Just different flavours of compromise.
Authenticate Everything
Every item you stock carries its own risks. Cigarette packs need visual inspection before resale. Water must be tested and filtered. Weapons require permits and modifications. Profitable chemicals rely on closely guarded recipes. Rare items need proper appraisal to avoid overpaying (or not).
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. But beware, there’s always mob justice.
Suppliers overstate value, customers push their luck, and contraband often comes with issues you only notice after the deal is done. Your margins depend on how well you assess what’s in front of you. Misjudge the item or the person selling it, and you absorb the cost.
Miss the signs, and you eat the cost. The game gives you a magnifying glass and a dream—and then punishes you mercilessly for having that dream.
Choose Your Poison
At the start, you pick a specialisation. Want to be a gunsmith? Expect inspections and permit hassles. A chemist? Hope you’re ready for addiction-related complications and angry customers. A water merchant? Just a regular fence skirting the law? Every path you take has some particularities in their product line that have their own way of ruining you. The thing that stays the same, though, is how much profit you need to make. Welcome to Space Capitalism.
Some trades need heavy machinery and permits; others just a good hiding spot and a straight face. The better the margins, the worse the consequences when something goes wrong.
The full game promises ten specialisations, expanded perks, deeper production chains, and the ability to buy your shop outright (or abandon it for a cozy place on the Upper Levels, if you’re a coward).
Morality and Space Capitalism Don’t Mix
And then come the moral dilemmas. A revolutionary begs you to sell them supplies for “the cause.” A Security officer fishes for information about your shadier clients. A desperate parent wants to buy medicine they can’t afford. And somewhere in the background, a rogue AI is possessing people, turning them into something not-quite-human—and every faction agrees the only solution is a bullet to the skull.
The demo’s most chilling moments come when you have to decide whether a twitchy customer is an Aug—an AI-controlled host—or just someone having a very bad day. Shoot wrong, and you’ve murdered an innocent person. Hesitate, and… well.
Probably Stolen – Cyberpunk Shopkeeper Sim
Probably Stolen understands something crucial about shop sims: the fantasy isn’t just about organising inventory or watching numbers go up. It’s about the people. The customers, the suppliers, the factions—every interaction is a story waiting to happen, and most of those stories will end with you slightly poorer and significantly more paranoid.
The game doesn’t release until October 28, 2026, but the demo is free on Steam right now. Play it. Then wishlist it. Then start mentally preparing yourself for the moral compromises you’re going to make.
Because on the Lower Levels, the customer is always wrong. But they might also be Security. And you can’t afford to guess wrong.
Release Date: 28 October, 2026
Platform: PC via Steam
