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PaperclipPerfector
23hr ago
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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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Probably Stolen: The Cyberpunk Shopkeeper Simulator Of Trying To Side Hustle Up In A Low Trust Capitalist Society (Also- Papers, Please)
Just a
short littlereview 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.
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.
Or more generally, what if it's objectively correct for you to dominate others?
THIS.
I really really want to see a good narrative subversion of anticolonialism. The good guys go and conquer the savages, civilize them, enlighten them, uplift them, and embody honor and Noblesse Oblige to be nice to them in the process and not just pointlessly oppress them or make them suffer. It doesn't have to be a zero sum game where one group exploits another, everyone can win simultaneously. There's a couple of stories that kind of sort of vaguely do this (Dr. Stone is the first that comes to mind), but I'd like to see it done in a way that specifically aknowledges the fact that colonialization is happening and can be controversial, and rejects the assumption that it's inherently negative. I'm not sure I've ever seen that done before.
This is the entire ISOT genre, going back to Stirling's original Trope Namer Island in the Sea of Time.
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