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?

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 …