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So, I’m scrolling through the news, and I see a headline about a Convenience store employe... So, I’m scrolling through the news, and I see a headline about a Convenience store employee charged with theft in Nebraska, who broke into a gaming machine, grabbed a bunch of cash, and then… tried to dump it into a Bitcoin ATM. The cops show up to find an empty store with tools scattered on the floor, and the kid just casually strolls back in later with over $14,000 in his pocket.
And my first thought wasn't "what a moron." It was, "Huh, sounds like the tutorial level for one of those new Steam games."
Let's be real, something is in the water. One minute, the big trend in PC gaming is wholesome, satisfying sims about neatly stocking shelves in a supermarket. The next, the entire indie scene has collectively decided that the ideal setting for cosmic horror, alien invasions, and zombie apocalypses is a grimy, 24-hour gas station off a desolate highway. It’s a full-blown subgenre now, and it appeared overnight like a weird rash, leading many to ask, So, uh, why are there suddenly at least 4 sinister convenience store simulators on Steam at once?
What the hell is going on?
The Great Gas Station Gold Rush
It’s not just one or two games. We're talking about a sudden, bizarrely specific flood. You've got Roadside Research, where you're a poorly disguised alien running a research outpost from a gas station to study humans before the big invasion. You're stocking shelves and pumping gas, all while trying not to let your tentacles show. Then there’s Hellmart, where your customers are toothy, grinning freaks and you have to board up the windows at night to fight off some fleshy, long-limbed nightmare in the chip aisle.
And it keeps going. The Walking Trade turns the convenience store near me into a post-apocalyptic trading post where you sell guns to survivors and fight off zombie hordes. Shift At Midnight is basically Papers, Please meets John Carpenter's The Thing, making you check IDs to spot predatory doppelgangers who want to buy a pack of smokes before turning into a mass of body horror.
It’s like a bunch of developers all had the same fever dream after eating a bad gas station hot dog. The leap from "let's simulate a grocery store" to "let's simulate a grocery store, but you're also being hunted by an elder god" is a short one, I guess. But why this, and why now? Is this some sublimated anxiety about inflation making a gallon of milk cost more than a pint of blood? Or are we just so beaten down by the soul-crushing reality of retail work that the only way to make it interesting is to add interdimensional monsters?
Honestly, I think it's simpler. I think we're fascinated by the mundane horror we already know. The flickering fluorescent light, the sticky floor, the guy buying lottery tickets at 3 AM who looks like he hasn't slept since the Clinton administration—that’s already a horror setting. The aliens and zombies are just window dressing. They’re a metaphor for the quiet desperation you feel when your only human contact for an eight-hour shift is someone trying to pay for gas with a fistful of pennies.
Life Imitates Low-Poly Art
Which brings me back to Christian Joyce in Gothenburg, Nebraska.
This kid wasn't fighting off a zombie horde or unmasking a doppelganger. He was, allegedly, just another dude working a dead-end job at a 24 hour convenience store who decided to make a change. His story is almost a parody of the games. There's no grand evil, no supernatural threat. Just a broken "skills game," a bunch of cash, and a spectacularly bad plan involving Bitcoin machines. It’s so much more pathetic, and frankly, more real.
The police report says they found tools just… laying around. I can just picture the scene. The faint hum of the coolers, the smell of stale coffee, and a claw hammer sitting next to a busted-open video poker machine. The employee is just gone. It's the perfect opening for a horror game. Instead, the protagonist just comes back to the scene of the crime, pockets bulging with cash, as if he just went out for a smoke.
This is the real "dangerous convenience store" experience. It ain't Cthulhu, it's quiet desperation and terrible life choices. It’s the crushing boredom that makes a $19,000 Bitcoin heist seem like a good idea. The games give us a monster we can fight with a shotgun. Real life gives you a felony charge and a court date, which is way scarier.
What does it say about us that our digital escapism now mirrors the bleakest, most mundane forms of real-world crime? We're not fantasizing about being space marines or dragon slayers anymore. We're fantasizing about surviving a slightly more interesting version of the worst job we ever had. Maybe I'm the crazy one here, but that feels... incredibly bleak. It’s like we’ve collectively given up on dreaming big and have settled for dreaming weird.
So, We're All Just Clowns in a Cosmic Vending Machine
Look, I don't know why four different development teams decided the world needed a game about a haunted convenience store at the exact same time. Maybe it's a glitch in the simulation. Or maybe it’s just the logical endpoint of a culture obsessed with the gig economy and side hustles. We've romanticized and gamified every other aspect of our miserable lives, so offcourse we were going to get around to the overnight shift at the corner store eventually. The monsters, the aliens, the zombies—they’re just a stand-in for the customers, the manager, and the existential dread. It’s all the same thing in the end: you’re trapped in a brightly lit box, selling processed junk to survive, just hoping whatever’s lurking outside doesn’t decide to come in.