Probably Stolen has me balancing stock, politics, and questionable morals

I’m a fan of dystopian vibes in media, from books to movies and everything in between; I mean, let’s be honest, we’re only a couple of disasters away from living in a dystopian world ourselves, and that’s being fairly optimistic. So when I saw Probably Stolen, I knew that I would enjoy the setting and the themes at play. 

Probably Stolen is a dystopian shop management sim by Questing Goose Studio that's delightfully reminiscent of Papers, Please, while adding a cyberpunk spin. It puts you in a hole-in-the-wall shop and challenges you to make the most of it in whatever way best suits you.

You can get involved in the counterfeit trade, team up with Security to get criminals off the streets, or just mind your own business. However you play, you’ll need to choose sides and balance your resources with space, and it’s incredibly addictive.

Whose side are you on, anyway?

Having recently binge-watched all of the currently available episodes of Silo, I was immediately drawn to the dystopian vibes of Probably Stolen. I feel like a Down Deeper working a back alley Supply store, and that’s something I can get entirely on board with. What I struggled to get on board with is the politics involved. 

Pretty early on, you learn that the Lower Level citizens are struggling, while the Upper Level citizens are doing pretty well. People who live on the Lower Levels come to you with tight budgets, asking for food, while those from the Upper Levels come to your window dressed in gaudy golden trinkets, seeking oddities and luxuries like alcohol and cigarettes. 

You have to balance your reputation with everyone, which is harder than it sounds considering you’re given a list of wanted people and have the chance to rat them out if they appear at your shop window. If you do, your reputation with the Resistance will go down, but your reputation with Security will go up. The problem is, who should you be siding with? It’s unclear from the demo, but I’m interested to find out.

Balancing the books

While all of the politics and other nonsense is playing out in the background, you have to focus on buying and selling goods to whoever happens to pop by your shop window. Most of the time this is fairly straightforward; a customer appears with a request, and you provide the goods they need, or someone offers you something, and you decide whether you want to buy it. 

Sometimes, though, things get a little more complicated. Wholesale buying quickly becomes important, with customers offering a discount on their selling price if you buy everything they have. But you need to be careful, because some items are counterfeit or contraband. In the demo of Probably Stolen, you start to get customers offering you cigarettes, and you need to check every pack to see whether they’re legit or questionable. 

One customer who paid a visit to the shop offered me a Security Department Evidence Locker. I’m not sure whether I was meant to buy it, but I was too intrigued not to, and now I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with it. Will my reputation with Security decrease if they find me with it, or worse? As it turns out, you can start reporting people who try to sell mid- to high-level contraband and get paid for turning them in, which sets a worrying precedent. 

Juggling space with stock

The inventory system in Probably Stolen is grid-based, with each item taking up a fixed number of squares in a finite space. That means you need to be careful what you buy, or you quickly run out of space. There are certain things that give you additional storage, such as the Apprentice’s Storage Bay, but that still only adds a small number of squares that you can fill. 

I came to a point in my playthrough of the demo when I had become so trigger-happy, buying everything I could, that I completely ran out of space and had to start transferring perfectly sellable items into the trash because I couldn’t leave them sitting on the counter. Even the display box on the wall ended up being more for storage than for its intended purpose of attracting specific customers. 

It’s worth balancing what you’ve already got with what you might need space for later. Say you’ve got an absolute ton of food but no materials; is it really worth buying more food and filling up valuable space that could be used to store materials? 

An influx of choices

Probably Stolen is the type of game that gets easier to understand the more you play it, but I can see it being very overwhelming for first-time players, and it definitely was for me. There’s a thing called choice paralysis, where having too many options can make it harder to make a decision at all, and I definitely felt it here. 

When you start a new game, you’re given a choice of different starting points. You can start as an Apprentice, which seems to be the most basic option, or an Organ Seller, among a long list of other choices. I’ll be honest, I clicked through the options and felt incredibly overwhelmed by how many there were, not to mention the fact that I didn’t understand enough about the game yet to make an informed decision. 

So I went with Apprentice because it seemed like the safest option, and began the buying and selling that makes up the central part of the game. I’m not entirely sure how the game changes if you pick a different starting point, but I am excited to play more and gradually broaden my horizons outside of Apprentice-level gameplay.

Probably Stolen is set to release on October 28. 2026, and the demo is available now. According to the reviews on Steam, people have been able to play the demo alone for over 20 hours, so there’s plenty of gameplay to keep you occupied while waiting for the full release.