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PaperclipPerfector  19hr ago (text post)   646 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 6, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Movies I have watched or re-watched recently:

Lake Placid (1999): Loved it! I don't care what anybody says, this is a much better movie than Jaws (1975); the pacing is faster, the characters are more endearing, the dialogue is funnier, and the special effects are prettier (the croc holds up very well for being a quarter-century old). Only the music is worse (nothing can compare to the legendary shark theme), but even then I found the use of Bob Marley's "Is This Love" at the end to be quite charming.

I was a little surprised by how open the characters are sexually; they don't actually show anything, but the female deputy literally tries to stop the rich guy from diving into the beast's lair by offering to sleep with him. I guess 90s movies were wilder than I remember.

Pearl Harbor (2001): Famously summarized by Roger Ebert as "a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle." That description is not wrong, exactly, but it makes it sound worse than it really is. Yes, as a result of the popularity of Titanic (1997), the movie was changed from a straight remake of Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) into a historical romance. And, yes, the Doolittle raid was unnecessary; the movie could have perfectly well climaxed with the attack on Pearl Harbor. But, for all of that, I found it very watchable. The two men had no chemistry with the female lead, but they sure as hell had it with each other, a bit like a live-action version of The Road to El Dorado (2000).

I actually watched this movie with my mother. It is very hard to find movies to watch with her, because she refuses to watch anything animated, anything science fiction or fantasy, and anything without a Spanish dub, while I refuse to watch terrible Netflix movies full of unnecessary gay characters and true crime slop. Her main takeaway was that the Chinese are bastards for bombing those poor people on the streets, and that I should not marry a Chinese woman. I tried to explain to her that A) the Japanese were the ones bombing Pearl Harbor; China was on the Allied side of the war, and B) Japan never bombed the hospital; that would be a war crime. She replied that "they are not allowed to make stuff up", therefore it must be true. So my main takeaway is how important it is to control what normies see onscreen, because to them, that is reality.

I have spent a few hours playing the Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake (on PC I might add). It's a very charming and well-made game. It lifts the spirit.

The devs added major image sharpening to it though, probably in an effort to make a 1080p game look better on 4K TVs or something. I hope that can be modded out soon.

Oh, it's out? What's changed compared to the original?

Such a timeless classic. Brings back some memories. Last I caught of it a couple years ago was the speedrunning community found some major sequence break in the first stage of the game, when you have to wade through the meadows as a kid; takes you right to the endgame.

I think it’s vulgar to pirate games (I assume you’re not ripping it from the cart). Call it a matter of honor. If one must do it, it is best not to mention it.

How are they doing it on consoles these days? Are they MOD chipping PS5’s with soldering irons like they did in the old days? Presumably the mechanisms have changed with time.

Browser exploits. Get RCE, break sandbox, patch kernel. But the dearth of exclusives worth playing on the PS5 means that this was the first generation of the console not worth jailbreaking.

I think it’s vulgar to pirate games (I assume you’re not ripping it from the cart). Call it a matter of honor. If one must do it, it is best not to mention it.

Why? With what the game industry as a whole has earned such a respect? AAA, microtransactions, wokeness (even worse than wokeness - cringe wokeness), bugs, abusive drm, overbearing licenses, consistently terrible writing, hostility and contempt towards their own audience and customers ... the list goes on. Even before gamersgate the industry was busy destroying the goodwill earned in the golden age of 1995-2006

It seems like this Zelda is a well made and reviewed game, I see no reason why the creators shouldn’t be compensated. Life involves thousands of decisions in which one can be pro or antisocial at little or no cost.

Why? With what the game industry as a whole has earned such a respect?

One does not need to earn "don't steal stuff". You are perfectly free to not respect the games industry (AAA or otherwise) all you wish. But then just don't play their games. It's not hard. If your disdain for the industry is so great, you won't be missing anything by not playing.

One does not need to earn "don't steal stuff".

Piracy is not stealing.

Yes it is.

No it is not. Now that we have moved our best daffy and bugs impression out of the way

Not only piracy is not stealing, but actually downloading for personal use is fairly legal (uploading is not), and on top of that because of the way cracks work it could be classified as fair use - it is security research after all.

Legality is not relevant here. You asked why you should refrain from pirating games, given that the companies haven't earned your respect. I am saying: you should refrain because, contrary to your assertion, piracy very much is stealing, and stealing from people is wrong whether or not you respect them.

If I pirate the game and then choose not to play it, have I financially deprived them in any way? I’ve not consumed their product.

A better argument is to (1) say that you wouldn't have bought it anyway, and (2) as actual supporting evidence cite the official EU study finding that the alleged displacement of video-game purchases by copyright-infringing downloads is fake: rather, infringement leads to an increase of +24 % in legitimate sales (vs. +0 % in music, −27 % in film and television, and −38 % in books).

1 wouldn’t have made any difference to the point, I don’t see what value it has to my statement. I wouldn’t defend 2 either, if nothing else but from a logical or a legal standpoint. It’s irrelevant whether or not committing a crime in the case of copyright infringement has the side effect of being beneficial to the producers of the product. The laws are already on the books and they say what they say. Now if I disagree with the law that’s the separate issue, but there’s no defense to be made at that point to determine if I’ve committed the crime by illegally consuming the product.

I’ve pirated movies I’ve never watched. I’m sure I had the intention at some point of doing so, or at the very least clicking through and catching a snippet of something to see if it piques my interest, but I don’t aimlessly download things I don’t use or need. And when I realize I can’t or won’t watch it, I delete it. It’s difficult for me to understand where exactly the financial harm is in that, but I’m sure someone could argue it.

The relative complexity of games today vastly outstrips the amount of work it took during the days of 8 bit cartridges you could mass produce. The original MK1 was one programmer, two artists and a sound designer. That’s it. 4 guys. These days, projects have in excess of 50+ people, and you often need the work of some of the most talented people in the video game industry. The economics make it cheaper to just go full CoD or Madden and endlessly reskin the same game year after year, than to try something novel and innovate.

What a vulgar assumption!!

The Project Zomboid modding acceleration has been fascinating to watch. From an isometric title in development for a decade to first person and third person, the entire USA as a playable map, Tony Zomboid’s Pro Skater… I imagine one day you’ll be able to plug in some coordinates and play a feature-rich zombie apocalypse game within a fairly accurate recreation of your neighborhood. Which is crazy, as someone whose childhood zombie game was CS:S zombie mods.

Will it finally get good NPCs this way? Wasn't that what everyone wanted out of it for years?

I think there are some mods like that floating around. Ugh, imagine a huge world with AI-guided variable / randomized interesting quests? Would be cool.

That's part of why I always thought that a really robust procgen setup could make for a fantastic game... then I encountered Bethesda's radiant quests.

Lectures explaining the math results OpenAI released in October:

(003) Quasi-Riemann, Radziwill

(008) Deligne-Drinfeld, Willwacher

(246) Cannon Conjecture, Bonk

(345) Closed Geodesics Conjecture, Mazzucchelli

(378) Exponential Time Hypothesis, O’Donnell

—--

Kaplansky: Unit->Zero Divisor->Idempotent->Direct Finiteness

Kaplansky Conjectures concern group algebras, and are very general statements about them. Only qualifications are those that are immediately obvious. They are first order statements that do not involve derived notions such as ideals, only notions one learns in Abstract Algebra 101.

Kaplansky himself proved Direct Finiteness in characteristic 0 in 1969, and until 2021, more than 70 decades after they were posed, only positive partial results, like “Zero Divisor Conjecture holds for Elementary Ameanable Groups.” were established. It was in 2021 that Gardam found a counterexample to Unit Conjecture over characteristic 2, and by Murray in odd characteristic, and in 2023 Gardam produced a counterexample in characteristic 0.

Each of these conjectures can be studied separately in characteristic 0, 2, or odd, with any proof or counterexample in some characteristic not being trivially transferred to others.

All these counterexamples concerned were in the “small presentation” programme, over groups whose study is amenable to pre-AI computer assisted research. The other branch is called “small cancellation”. As Gardam admits, the way he discovered this counterexample was by encoding the statement as a SAT problem, and then use a SAT solver.

In a chain of implications of conjectures, disproving one disproves those to its left too, while saying nothing about those to its right. (Conversely, proving one, proves to its right too, but in the case of Kaplansky conjectures, this did not happen.) The leftmost is the strongest statement, the rightmost the weakest.

Fast forward to early October 2026. Among the claimed results of OpenAI are:

-Counterexample to Zero Divisors in characteristic 2 (196)

-Counterexample to Direct Finiteness in characteristic 2 (197) reasoning traces

-Counterexample to Direct Finiteness in odd characteristic (197)

-Proof of Idempotent in characteristic 0 (207)

Characteristic 0 Characteristic 2 Odd Characteristics
Unit Gardam, 2023 Gardam, 2021 Murray, 2021
Zero Divisor Unknown OAI, 2026 OAI, 2026
Idempotent OAI, 2026 OAI, 2026 OAI, 2026
Direct Finiteness Kaplansky, 1969 OAI, 2026 OAI, 2026

OpenAI’s counterexamples do not come from the “small presentation” branch. In the well-circulated “100 Reactions” compilation, Gardam seems upset.

I know we have a lot of tabletop roleplayers here, so here is a free one-shot adventure I created and played for a modern occult horror setting. I also ran a televised version of this adventure which will be streaming later on.

https://trueliferpg.substack.com/p/heist-at-the-gardiner

Headline is CW, but I'm posting here because the syntax made me do a double-take. CW material is spoilered out.

Pakistani Uber Eats driver admits kissing schoolgirl, 9, in shopping centre

When I saw it on Substack it was in all caps, so it read PAKISTANI UBER EATS DRIVER.

First self-driving cars – now cars that eat people!

Man, I know that ships are registered in a particular country, but now cars are too?

An update on my Rimworld modding-spree:

Holy shit. Opus 5.5 is just that good. I'd heard people gushing about it since release, and I've definitely tracked the flood of new software it and Astra enabled. I just hadn't used it for anything more intensive than what Fable or prior Opus models had been capable of.

I got my hands dirty by starting a mod that expands the permit system from the Royalty DLC. It worked so smoothly I was taken aback, and my involvement was largely playtesting, ideation and balance suggestions. Even the testing was largely automated, Claude could write test scenarios, take screenshots and review logs.

We went on to MVP - by which I mean the maximally viable product. It had no issues integrating content from 45 additional mods when I shared my 500+ mod list.

It also made permits much more flexible, and added customization and QOL no problemo.

I had been tracking token usage, and at medium reasoning effort I still barely made a dent in my 5x Max plan.

I launched additional instances - a few QOL mods. Another moderate-sized expansion of Empire content, this time focusing on adding new unit types, making the Imperial court feel more alive, additional political and economic systems.

The biggest headache was that if I had the OLED TV I use as my monitor set to sleep, the pc would eventually stop rendering things. Screenshots would come out black and even worse, the game wouldn't launch. An agent found a way around the latter, though there was no way for them to change actual sleep or power settings. I didn't press that too hard, there's probably something, and I don't want to risk screen burn in.

This added a little extra time as I couldn't check some things while I had downtime at work.

I then had an agent make a LLM-powered storyteller, and a better one that any out there. I even had it figure out how to use CC instead of my API credits for the calls.

I also discovered the agents could schedule cron jobs, and later, found out that they could message each other for coordination purposes. Made my life even easier.

I set one of the spare agents to make programming art for assets (Opus is quite good at that) to save me the minimal hassle of using a dedicated image model. It also made decorations and UI elements for the other models, and seemed to be enjoying itself. In the Singularity, the most important thing is to have fun and be yourself.

I also had them make a multi-purpose bridge with hooks into the game state to ease their testing, which works just fine. Computer Use would be better, but would mean I'd have to leave the screen on and surrender control of input when I'm using the pc myself.

Later, I had one of them run performance profiling to find out what was making my rather bloated mod list slow down. It was able to figure out the culprits, including breaking things down by constant TPS tax and 1% lows or stutters.

I then had it simply fix a few mods. Easy as that. A few code optimizations, fixing bad patches.

An agent with downtime got tasked with code review. It found a few bugs, and then worked with the agents with ownership to fix it all.

Still wasn't happy with the performance, but it quickly became apparent that the only solution would be jumping to the 1.7 beta where they had swapped out the game engine from Unity to Waylith (maintaining near perfect backwards compat for mods and saves!). I'd eat my hat if a project of that scope hadn't benefited from the recent leaps in AI coding.

This went surprisingly painlessly. Most of my mods survived, and even when I had to remove several performance mods that were no longer compatible, I still got nearly double the TPS and like a fifth the load time on boot.

The agents got their mods updated without major hitches, the only one that didn't survive the transition depended on a different mod that hadn't been updated. I can probably solve that too if I try.

I then managed to get a solid game in, and the majority of bugs I found were probably to do with the original mods and not mine.

Now that is pod-racing vibecoding. I feel like a slightly clueless but well-meaning PM with a full staff of Senior Engineers on call. I say something, it gets done, and when it doesn't, they usually find a workaround or alternative. There's no observable degradation in performance before or after compaction. I remember when we had to be meticulous in prompting, and and precisely define tasks and goals. Now, I often just half-arse things by telling Opus to use its own discretion or stick to stopping by to give feedback. My primary contribution is enough game knowledge and wider awareness to come up with ideas in the first place.

I'm currently considering a mod that simply makes or sets up bases in Rimworld for me. I restart playthroughs quite regularly (mods breaking, TPS death, boredom from lack of challenge) and I find making a brand new base a chore at times, even with God Mode. Ideally, I'd like Opus to be able to just make something for me on the fly, and make the colony feel like something that's growing of its own volition, rather than helpless without my constant intervention.

I think this would work, though making it as quick and responsive as I want might be a challenge. Expanding my existing feature-complete mods wouldn't break a sweat. If Claude had native image gen capabilities, that would have been even nicer. Creating art with code works fine in some places, but it's not a general purpose solution. I can probably work up a way to get it to talk to Codex.

I'd worked with Sol 5.6 and 6.0 for my last mod, and a bit with Astra, but they were too token hungry for my taste. Opus 5.5 is simply much more pleasant to work with, and takes an appropriate but not excessive amount of initiative, while demonstrating good taste. Even Opus 4.7 and 4.8 had guzzled usage on a 20x plan, let alone a 5x one. It's a slow day at work, and I really wish I'd booted my pc up with CC running and prepped things for later.

And no, no real disasters from giving the agents unrestricted access to my C drive. Worst that's happened is one of them overwriting a mod list, or sometimes getting in each other's way. I have nothing on it that I can't afford to lose, really.

I could live like this. The bottleneck is simply my imagination, and I have plenty of imagination.

Had a very similar experience at a smaller scale over the past couple of weeks. I was tasked with producing an exercise for an enterprise IT software team that utilized some lite RPG and board game elements along with the reality of what they do.

The premise is "The Iron Triangle" of time/money/quality and how that influences up across the 4 core factions in every organization. They each have fundamentally different mandates but and ways to get there but a broadly similar goal.

I was able to produce a board game with monolithic rendering engines for web and print, rules, a pipeline to pump it on version increments to our file share, and the flexibility to add scenarios to the base game or rebrand it with the client's colors. There's a sim and strategy engine that updates balance figures.

Human playtesting was utterly necessary and seamless to integrate. I'd literally point claude code at the transcript file from our playtest and we'd run through another version iteration iteratively over 20 minutes and a couple thousand tokens. After 3 cycles it's at the level of quality I find acceptable, and the half day session with 8 participants was worth $13,000 to someone!

Beyond that it's just... fun? With the right facilitator the dry flavortext about the shit we have to deal with every day is actually kind of funny. The scenarios bring in real tension, arguments about what to do next, and a cool combination of teamwork and competition among the factions.

I cribbed a whole lot from Dune Imperium, Sycthe, Magic, and go knows what else but even as a pale imitation of what a real artist would make it was the most fun I've had at work in a long time.

13k? At API prices? Jesus. I suppose that's cheaper than testing on prod, though I would dispute that's "smaller scale".

I'm hoping you're just European and mean $13.

I've only just been surprised by the fact that Things Just Work. I make a point of having LLMs try tasks that I'm not entirely sure they're capable of, because I end up positively surprised often enough to be worth it. I was trying AI for Rimworld mods since middle 2025, and it was a slog even for a dead-simple project. It was a nuisance 6 months back. Now, the biggest concern is endless scope creep, and I can't even say that the mods breakdown when you shoot for the moon.

I would never have made these mods with AI-assistance. I know people are getting half-decent 3D models out of them, and at some point I might get even more ambitious. Depends on how the upcoming 6.2 Astra and Fable do I guess.

To be clear that's what I charged for the session, and I am using the $20 tier of Anthropic subscription. Printing the game board and collateral cost more than the AI.

Like you I've been humbled. I still see areas in which my taste and strategy are required, but the water has risen from my knees to the chest.

I could stress about it but building the things I want without endless conversations with humans has felt amazing.

Probably Stolen: The Cyberpunk Shopkeeper Simulator Of Trying To Side Hustle Up In A Low Trust Capitalist Society (Also- Papers, Please)

Just a short little review for an indie game that came out last week. I've spent more time watching and reflecting than playing while recovering.

TL;DR: Take a look if a sub-$20 indie game for a weekend and the following appeals to you. If you like economy engine games, you'll have something to work with. If you liked Papers, Please, you'll find thee vibes nostalgic. And if you like moodier fiction that's light on social commentary and allows a glimmer of hope, there's something here that's not epic, but human, to satisfy you.

Probably Stolen: Cyberpunk Shopkeeper Sim is a PC game about being a shopkeeper on a sci-fi space station trying to get out of your ever-increasing rent by buying your store outright. You're not a classy shopkeeper either, but a 'rummages in the dump to try and find drained scrap electronics to sell' sort. Your customer base is predominantly lower class, selling guns or rat meat are equally viable, and the janitor's union is why you dare not take out your own trash. Also, there's a brewing cyborg-assimilation uprising in the making, not to be confused with the perma-revolution, and both are some off your better customers. The later you can sell a lot of restricted goods, and the other you can shoot for a bounty and kudos from the cops.

Curious? Here we go.

Probably Stolen As A Game

Probably Stolen is a game with a very basic premise: you need to make rent. If you don't, you'll be kicked out and forced to haggle from the other side of the shop window. Your victory condition is to make enough profit to buy your shop outright so you don't pay rent, which isn't so easy since rent goes up by a compounding 20% per week. Your fail state is to fail to make rent. Or to piss of the wrong people too many times. Or to not shoot enough body-jacking cyborgs.

Your core gameplay is a day-night cycle of inventory management. During the day, business is open and customers come to your counter offering to buy or sell. You want to maximize margins by buying low and selling high. Modifiers are applied based on what a particular customer wants, station-wide economic issues like water shortages, or the five-finger discount of selling stolen goods. During the night, you can go to a few specialty stores, try to scavenge, or recover from previous wounds. At the end of every week you pay rent, which is always going up, so you need to make ever more money to stay afloat.

I called this an economic engine game. This is the sort off game where you spend money to make money, and the more you invest the more you can make. In the early game you might be selling scrap you scavenge from the dump, but sell enough you can buy a furnace too turn scrap metal into metal ingots worth more. Then you can use those ingots to buy or sell more at the storefront, or as inputs into even higher value goods.

It's also a build strategy game. The basic barter system you start out with can't keep up with rising rent. You need to specialize, and the better you do the better you get. A water farmer can become a fish farmer can sell caviar to the upper class. Investing in certain shop signs means you're more likely to get the customers who sell what you want and buy what you have. This becomes your outside-the-store side hustle. This is where the build diversity emerges. You'll probably not do one single thing, but gun-running and rat-farming specialists are equally viable. They also come with their own differences. In one, your customer base will often be rebels which might put you at odds with station security. In the other, you're more at risk if you become a public health hazard and poison the station in pursuit of profit.

Build diversity plays into character customization. The player character is a nameless faceless person, but at the start of each run you can pick perks with positive effects that cost perk points, or penalty perks that offer more perk points for positive perks. Sometimes these perks get you started on a specific build route a bit (lot) faster. Sometimes they come with penalties like alcohol addiction that worsens your margins unless you drink your own stock (which worsens margins). This system offers a lot of build diversity, so that while any given run is probably 4ish hours give or take, you have great replayability too try and master new builds.

There are other gameplay aspects. There is a memory-and-attention meta-game for recognizing the cyborg threat, a compare-and-contrast game for evaluating items based on a referenced guide of features to work for, and a crafting game. This is where the game slows down and may not be as fun. But at it's core- buy low, refine, sell high.

Probably Stolen As Low-Trust Storytelling

It's hard to talk about Probably Stolen without talking about Papers, Please. From the (admittedly superior) pixel art style, to the 'minor functionary in an uncaring system,' to the core mechanic of people walking up to your window and you choosing how to do with them. It's very obvious the game took very heavy inspiration from Papers, and a lot of the reasons it worked there works here.

Probably Stolen and Papers, Please are games where being an honest, incorruptible soul is a sucker's gambit, and probably end up with you starving. Papers, Please was not-soviet-block communism, and Probably Stolen is sci-fi cyberpunk capitalism, but both are about broadly uncaring systems that can reward you one day and turn on you the next. Corruption isn't just a crime, it's a survival strategy, and the only reasonable one. If you aren't willing to turn a blind eye to those five-finger discounts or make friends with unpleasant people, you won't have a good (or long) time.

And it's not just you. Everyone around you is corrupt. Everyone expects you to be corrupt. Thieves come to you to fence goods. The Revolution is at your window right after Security. The local protection racket comes with an offer you'll wish you had taken if you hadn't, even as you might try to figure out how to skip coverage days to save payments. You have a shotgun by your desk so that if you see a cyborg at your stall, you can shoot them... though not after taking advantage of their offerings, of course. Business is business, and rent is due.

Probably Stolen and Papers, Please don't have in-depth storytelling or grand oratory, but they do have vibes. Among the interchangeable customers you try to rip off as hard as you can are some reoccuring faces you'll start to recognize, like the scavenger who tells outrageous lies but charges accordingly. Some are wanted characters you can turn in for a profit. Others have short story arcs. They come to your window, they talk a bit, you you may or may not do them a favor. Or try to rip them off. Or give them a discount for your own selfish reasons of reputational concerns or inventory clearance. Business is business.

I might have a notalgia bias and feel Papers, Please had the stronger character writing (or at least characters who showed up more often in an shorter period of time), but Probably Stolen captures that vibe of having the side hustle. There is no comfortable lazy evenings after work. There is no paid vacation when you are self-employed.

You work for yourself, no one is looking out for you unless you've made it in their interest, and any time spent at home is time not spent scavenging or after-hour sales. Sometimes this is necessary, and you have to recover. But time is money, time not spent making money is falling behind, and rent is ever rising. Look thhe other way, take the five fingered discount when you can get away with it, but learn when it's too much.

Probably Stolen is good at that, in the gameplay-is-storytelling sort of way. It is a hard capitalist world, even if it is one with food stamps.

Probably Stolen As An Earn Your (Unglorious) Happy Ending Setting

What makes Probably Stolen, and Papers Please, work so well with me is conceptually is that it avoids the pitfalls of over-the-top grimdark or good-versus-evil moralizing.

Probably Stolen is a cyberpunk genre story, and the word you might hear most often after 'cyberpunk' is 'dystopia.' But Probably Stolen's station is not a socio-political dystopia, it's just a shitty place to live. But it's also the sort of place where you can- by grit or skill and even kindness- get or give very modest happy endings, without caveat. If you buy your shop, it's yours, and the profits that got you there are likely to see you comfortably into the neon sunset. You can help an idealist expose corruption and it's not simply ignored. You can take down Space Monsanto's GM crop business model. You can get away with a good feeling of satisfaction, and the game isn't going to try and rob you of it. If you stop the cyborg apocalypse outbreak, it's actually stopped.

I feel that's rare nowadays. I feel a lot of writers would just go for bitter-sweet-at-best storytelling, and this was a bit of a palate cleanser in that it didn't.

In a lot of dystopian (and cyberpunk) fiction, things have to suck because the narrative tone wouldn't work if it allowed people to have nice things. Warhammer has to have pyrhhic victories because the setting is five minutes from midnight. Cyberpunk 2077 can't change Night City's culture of corruption and psychotic cyborgs because without that the setting doesn't exist. In capitalist-critique fiction, it's often an anti-capitalism core premise that capitalism can't succeed, that success is exploitation, that the only victory allowed is the glorious and virtuous success of the revolution. So many writers could go into how the cycle of corruption and poverty and capitalism inevitably drags you down, that any happiness is fleeting, that someone bigger will just come up and steal it all from you and kick you back down. If there is a happy ending, it has to overwrite the whole setting.

Probably Stolen isn't that sort of game. It's a game about running a shop and trying to buy your own place. If you win, you will continue to be a shopkeeper. It's easier to win if you can get along with the local cops and revolutionaries alike, and you can. (Mostly.) Characterizations are light, but NPCs aren't merely caricatures. Yeah, the cops are corrupt, but they aren't all bastads, and they do goo after real crimes (including yours).

It's also a game where you can, in fact, build ties and positive relations for mutually beneficial relations, and where cartoonish corporate villainy doesn't pay. The game basically runs a factional reputation system with various core interest groups and social classes. Good relations get you good stuff, like warnings of future events (that you can profit-maximize around), or cops that will turn a blind eye in your favor rather than against you. Negative relations get you bad stuff, like getting lynched and thrown out the airlock if the lower classes hate you enough. Your biggest driver of relationships, beyond special requests, is how you conduct what sort of business.

I'm not saying its amazing or nuanced or the best thing since Fallout: New Vegas. I am saying that it strikes a balance, and that's appreciated.

The Less Pleasant Parts of Probably Stolen

This game has some things that I don't like, enough that I bounce off the gameplay even if I appreciate the premise. Consider this your forewarning.

First, the game has some tediuous busy work baked into that 5-hour run length. Your core game play is basically clicking and dragging items on a screen, which is menu management with a differennt UI. Factor in the crafting system, and you'll be dragging items to items to make / refine / harvest / store them. It's not so bad at first, but the game can grind in a way that's probably not meant as capitalist commentary.

Second, the game is rather meta-knowledge centric, but not necessarily hard. Your first run is learning how things work until you lose and are out of work. Later runs rely on the meta-knowledge, and the meta-analsysis, of what works best. As a game that's fundamentally about profit-maximizing, it's also a bit of a solved problem. Carefully consider how much outside analysis or wiki support you use.

Third, people most interested by the Papers, Please comparison are probably going to be more disappointed by the endings. Part of the replay value of Papers, Please was the variety of outcomes from your time at the window. You could side with the government as a loyalist tool, throw your lot in with the revolution, or flee the country. There is none of that here- you either buy your store or you lose, and most endings are different forms of losing. Replayability is almost entirely about build-flexibility, not narrative.

And that's about it.

Probably Stolen: Cyberpunk Shopkeeper Sim is on sale on Steam. It's currently got a 10% discount for an in introductory offer, so that roughly $20 USD price is currently $18.

Consider it if you're the sort of person who likes econ-engine games, the indie classic Papers, Please, or if you'd just like some balanced grim-grey where you can earn a happy ending without being hit over the head too much by hamfisted politics. You'll probably fail at first, but can beat it in a weekend, and can have a few afternoons of fun trying out different ways.

Cheers.

Probably Stolen uses the Cyberpunk Aesthetic exceedingly well but does not have the spirit. The Punk is supposed to be rebellion. Cyberpunk was a genre that criticized trends in contemporary society, and speculated as to how future technology might be used to oppress the masses while centering power and resources in the hands of the few. It was a setting where individuals struggle against a system that is completely rigged against them. A rags to riches game in which your hard work is rewarded with opportunities, the local police is happy to take your side if your scratch their back, and you can simply purchase your way out of poverty completely flies in the face of this. It makes the rebels look like entitled idiots and make the underclass out to be lazy and stupid. If earning your way out of poverty is this easy why doesn't everyone do it? Why rebel when society is clearly functional?

I guess it's just because the 80's were so long ago at this point that the origins of the genre largely don't matter to newer creators. Ultimately, Probably Stolen is a cozy and uplifting game that provides you with a bit of escapism from everyday struggles that are not so easily overcome. Your actions as a shop keep have a clear impact on the world around you, but the stakes never go beyond increasing your personal wealth and status. It is chill and fun and does its job well. The dissonance of this being in a cyberpunk setting is just very striking to me.

I beat this game a couple of days ago. I mostly agree with your analysis, although I think I enjoyed it slightly less than you seem to have. I don't know if I just lucked out with a good build but I beat it on my first run (on normal difficulty). I think my main critique is just the snowballing leading to reverse-difficulty curve: if you are doing well then the game gets easier over time as your income grows exponentially faster than the rent does.

I do like the optimistic pro-capitalist narrative that you point out here, but that does take away a lot of the nuance and tradeoffs that Papers Please had. You don't have to worry about whether to let the sympathetic but illegal person get away with their counterfeit papers at personal expense to yourself. Any time you spot a counterfeit good you just point it out and buy it at discount prices. The baddies you shoot with your gun are unambiguously bad and you just shoot them with no guilt or regret. The illegal goods you buy and sell don't have narrative weight to the story and cause people to suffer or die, they just make security slightly unhappy with you. The landlord doesn't offer you distasteful tradeoffs to stave of death, you just pay him each week until you have enough to buy him out.

It's a fun game. Mechanically it has way more depth and complexity than Papers Please. But narratively there's not much there.

I think this better captures what I was trying too gesture at with the 'what I didn't like' section. I think I mentioned I bounced off the gameplay- I have a hard time with 'spot the difference' visual games in general and any game that makes me squint is a literal eye sore- and while I characterized it as light on the endings vis-a-vis Papers, Please, it does go further than that. I actually cut off a diatribe of why the moral ambiguity of PP works, which would have led to an longer reflection on story writing, but I wanted to keep it tighter (and didn't see easy-to-reference scripts to try and do any comparisons).

My... enjoyment? appreciation?... is much more at the abstract level. @Bombadil wrote a fair post of how while it uses the cyberpunk aesthetic it doesn't lean into the punk-ethos. To me this was a feature, not a bug, as I find settings where everything must oppress you because the setting demands it to be trite. A setting where life can be hard but winnable is a better ethos than 'you never had a chance' / 'the only chance is The Glorious Revolution.'

I agree in general. I really like trope subversions that lean optimistic like that. I think Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has a lot of flaws as a work, but forgive almost all of them due to its ending and its ethos throughout. What if you reject the humility of the masses, and the social norms that are holding you back, and you do the good thing and you win? There is no Karmic principle of equivalent exchange forcing every gain to be met with an equal loss. There is no law saying any attempt to be clever must be met with ironic consequences. Sometimes reality is exploitable and you can exploit it and win.

What if you reject the humility of the masses, and the social norms that are holding you back, and you do the good thing and you win?

Or more generally, what if it's objectively correct for you to dominate others?

Fantastic intro. I did not get bitten by the bug of Papers, Please and I may have the same challenge here - my time is precious enough that sinking multiple 5 hour cycles into one game to get maximum enjoyment out of it is a tough ask. Other games include me socially interacting with friends or having a checkpoint I can go back to after only 30m of mistakes.

But I can't help but feel like if I could invest the time I'd have a blast. Thanks for the review.

Your core gameplay is a day-night cycle of inventory management. During the day, business is open and customers come to your counter offering to buy or sell. You want to maximize margins by buying low and selling high. Modifiers are applied based on what a particular customer wants, station-wide economic issues like water shortages, or the five-finger discount of selling stolen goods. During the night, you can go to a few specialty stores, try to scavenge, or recover from previous wounds. At the end of every week you pay rent, which is always going up, so you need to make ever more money to stay afloat.

All I have to say, is, Capitalism, ho!

Irish journalist who presented himself as an expert in fake news and disinformation is discovered to have lied about his academic credentials.

I wanted to call this Ireland's answer to Jason Arday, but alas, he's no diversity hire.

"Mogging" mogs all the other words to be crowned Collins Dictionary's word of the year for 2026.

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