Probably Stolen puts you behind the counter of a shop on a dystopian space station split by wealth and corruption, selling merchandise whose paperwork doesn’t bear examining. From tinyBuild — publisher of Graveyard Keeper, Potion Craft and Kingmakers — and Montreal’s Questing Goose Studio, it’s a gritty cyberpunk shopkeeping sim about how far you’ll go to make rent.
You buy and sell what you can to survive, navigate faction loyalties, and reach for a gun when the situation calls for it. The question the game keeps asking is a good one: how much trouble are you willing to monetise?
Pick Your Poison
You start by choosing a trade — and this is where the design gets genuinely interesting, because you’re not picking an aesthetic, you’re picking which flavour of disaster you’re signing up for.
Every product carries its own profit curve and its own way of ruining you. Weapons attract inspections. Contraband invites raids. Some trades demand heavy machinery and permits; others just need a decent hiding spot. As tinyBuild puts it, you’re not choosing a theme for your shop — you’re choosing what kind of trouble you’re willing to monetise.
That’s a smart framing for a genre that often reduces specialisation to a stat difference. Here your business type determines which authority is most likely to come through the door, which is a far more interesting consequence than a modified sell price.
Every Customer Is a Gamble
This is the heart of it. Your margins depend on how well you read both the item in front of you and the person selling it, and misjudging either means absorbing the cost yourself. You can shave product quality to squeeze out extra profit, but that’s a fast route to either Security attention or mob justice — and the game seems keen for you to discover which one finds you first.
Six starting paths, each with distinct profit curves, regulatory exposure and failure states. Your trade decides your enemies.
Assess items and sellers correctly or eat the loss. Cutting quality earns more — and invites consequences from very different directions.
Multiple powers operate on the station, and where your sympathies land shapes who protects you and who comes looking.
Rogue AI-augmented individuals move among the population, kidnapping people for unclear ends. Every faction agrees on the response.
The Landlord Always Wins
It’s a clean bit of pressure design, and it’s what turns the whole thing from a trading sim into something closer to a survival game. A ratchet that only tightens means you can never settle into a comfortable routine — the moment your system starts working reliably, the rent catches up and pushes you back toward the risky decisions you’d been avoiding.
Who’s Making It
That last point is worth dwelling on. Graveyard Keeper made a management loop out of quietly appalling decisions and it worked brilliantly. A cyberpunk shopkeeper weighing whether the customer at the counter is a cop is very much the same instinct pointed at a different setting.
Probably Stolen has no announced release date yet. The Steam playtest is live now, and the game is available to wishlist.
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