It gives me great nerdly joy that the Next Fest demo on Steam's 100 most-played games list is a shopkeeping sim

As the sicko cartoon goes: "YES… HA HA HA… YES!" That's how I feel while peering at Steam's 100 most-played games list and spotting the Next Fest demo for shopkeeping sim Probably Stolen.

A singleplayer game about sitting behind a desk and managing inventory doing that well among the other 8,000+ demos that have arrived for Next Fest? So well it's actually charting with 34,230 concurrent players?

YES!

I played the demo back in September and loved it because it made me feel like I was running a corner store in Dredd or Cyberpunk 2077. You sit behind the counter of a grimy little shop on a space station and sell everything from food and beverages to weapons and cybernetic implants to a collection of interesting, unusual, and occasionally suspicious customers.

There's a bit of Fallout to it, as well: at night you can go and scavenge scrap and junk from trashpiles in hopes of adding something valuable to your inventory. You can do some crafting, too, smelting metals into ingots once you've got the gear for it, and this is the grim future so you can also start a rat farm and sell off the meat.

You can shop at other specialty vendors to acquire hard-to-find items to use or sell yourself, and there's even a bit of Papers, Please with the moral dilemmas you'll face: there's an underground movement fighting against the cyber-dystopia you can help or hinder, depending on if you want to turn a revolutionary in for a tidy bounty or keep your mouth shut if you spot someone on the cops' most-wanted list.

And don't worry, you don't need to be a huge sim geek to enjoy running the shop in Probably Stolen. The sim does go enjoyably deep, though: you can use a magnifying glass (Strange Horticulture style) to examine items for signs of counterfeiting, and even sell those counterfeit goods yourself to rich dummies who wouldn't know a legitimate cyber implant from a fake.

In other words, I'm pumped to see Probably Stolen getting so many players during Steam Next Fest, and you should become one of those players if you aren't already. There's not much longer to wait for the full game, either: Probably Stolen launches next week on October 28.