Loot List: Thief Sim First Look: I Broke Into a House to Cook Sausages for a Dog
Loot List: Thief Sim has somehow made burglary feel like running errands for the world's most dysfunctional neighbourhood. Your clients include dogs demanding sausages, homeless people requesting booze and books, and apparently nobody who understands that stealing things is supposed to make you rich. After playing the opening solo robbery in the free demo, I'm pleasantly surprised. The actual burglary is fun, the humour is excellent, and I genuinely wanted to keep exploring. Whether the changing shopping lists can keep that excitement alive is another question.
Enjoy breaking into houses but fancy stealing something more valuable than a dog's dinner? Our Crime Simulator review covers a proper burglary career with co-op chaos, criminal upgrades and considerably more profitable shopping lists.
Organised Crime Has Officially Gone to the Dogs
I've played games where I've robbed banks, stolen expensive cars and made enough fictional money to purchase a small country. Loot List, however, introduces a criminal organisation with considerably more modest ambitions. A dog wants sausages.
Fair enough. Dogs have needs. But apparently acquiring these sausages requires a human accomplice willing to commit burglary on its behalf. Somewhere along the line, man's best friend has discovered organised crime, and the results are magnificent.
Then there are homeless people requesting booze and books, and a bloke smoking two cigarettes simultaneously. Not one after the other, mind you. Two. Either he's having the worst day imaginable or he's just been informed what the dog wants for dinner.
The whole thing is wonderfully stupid, and I mean that as a compliment. Loot List doesn't need to explain why these people and animals have formed an underground network of petty theft. They're there, they want things, and you're the idiot who's agreed to collect them.
Before you're trusted with this enormous responsibility, however, there's a little puzzle involving coloured blocks and matching holes. Yes, that children's toy. The one designed to establish whether a toddler can distinguish red from blue without requiring professional intervention. I laughed.
Apparently, before embarking on a career in burglary, you must first demonstrate that you possess the cognitive abilities of a three-year-old. Frankly, considering the people we're working for, it seems an unnecessarily strict recruitment policy.
Breaking and Entering and Preparing Dinner
The real highlight of this criminal circus is the cooking. One of your objectives involves stealing cooked sausages. The trouble is that finding sausages isn't necessarily enough. If they're raw, you'll have to cook them yourself.
Think about that for a moment. You've broken into someone's house. You've got limited time before your opportunity to escape disappears. There are cupboards to search, belongings to investigate and potentially valuable items scattered around the property. And you're standing in the kitchen, preparing sausages. For a dog.
At what point does burglary become catering? Is there a separate criminal charge for seasoning? If the homeowner comes downstairs, do you threaten them or ask where they keep the frying pan?
I can't help imagining the police report. "Suspect entered the premises unlawfully, searched several rooms, prepared a quantity of meat and fled." "Was anything stolen?" "Yes, officer. Dinner."
And things can get worse. One particularly important culinary discovery: don't cook milk. I won't pretend this was part of some sophisticated experiment into environmental physics. The lesson was considerably simpler. Unless you want the surrounding decor to catch fire, milk is best left out of your criminal cooking adventures.
There is something absolutely glorious about a game where the difference between a successful burglary and a household disaster might depend on whether the thief understands basic food preparation.
Prefer planning your burglaries instead of improvising dinner in somebody else's kitchen? Our Thief Simulator 2 review explores a more methodical criminal career, where scouting houses is half the fun and the other half occasionally breaks spectacularly.
Ten Minutes, One House and Absolutely No Respect for Privacy
Eventually, Loot List allows you to do some proper stealing. The first robbery takes place inside a quiet house, and you've got ten minutes to complete the job. It's a simple setup, but it works remarkably well.
What surprised me was how much I enjoyed just investigating the place. You can open and interact with plenty of things, explore the rooms and discover a few unexpected details along the way. I actually felt like a burglar. Not the glamorous Hollywood variety who enters through a skylight, disables seventeen lasers and escapes with a diamond worth more than Belgium's national debt. Just a nosy criminal wandering around someone's home, opening everything in sight and wondering what might be worth nicking.
It's an important distinction. A lot of heist games focus on the spectacular parts of crime: explosions, gunfights, alarms and dramatic getaways. Loot List finds entertainment in the much smaller act of being somewhere you shouldn't be. And I rather like that. There's something wonderfully intrusive about opening a stranger's cupboards simply because you can. Every room becomes a little opportunity to discover something unexpected.
Unfortunately, the game doesn't always make it clear what you're actually allowed to steal. Some things can be interacted with, others appear less useful, and initially it's difficult to distinguish between an object that matters and one that's merely part of the environment. Now, during your first burglary, that's not necessarily terrible. Part of the enjoyment comes from learning how everything works.
But the ten-minute timer changes the equation. If I waste two minutes rummaging through someone's belongings because I'm curious, that's my problem. I'm a burglar with poor time management skills. If I waste two minutes because the game hasn't made its interactions sufficiently clear, that's a different matter entirely. A thief should be worried about getting away with the goods, not whether the game recognises a perfectly stealable object as officially stealable.
Still, I managed to extract the items required by both the dog and the homeless character. The first robbery was a success, and more importantly, I had fun doing it. Nobody became a millionaire. A dog presumably had a lovely evening.
A Cartoon Criminal Career With a Few Technical Problems
Visually, Loot List reminds me a little of Sea of Thieves. There's a similar colourful, exaggerated quality to the presentation, which suits the game's completely unserious approach to criminality. The cartoon sound effects when picking up objects are particularly enjoyable. It's a small detail, but one that makes rummaging through somebody's possessions unexpectedly amusing.
The controls were less successful. Controller support is advertised, but it didn't work properly during my demo session, so I switched back to keyboard and mouse. That's not proof that every controller suffers the same problem, but it's something to be aware of if you're planning to play from the sofa. For now, keyboard and mouse were the practical choice during my test.
And while the developers advertise cooperative robberies, security systems, physical interactions and criminal-hideout progression, my experience so far is limited to the opening solo gameplay. I haven't tested multiplayer or seen enough progression to judge whether upgrading your criminal operation becomes meaningful. There's no point pretending otherwise.
The Shopping List Could Be Brilliant. Or Become a Bloody Chore.
Here's what interests me most about Loot List. The developer's central idea is that your objectives change. Instead of performing exactly the same robbery for exactly the same prize, you're given different things to collect. In theory, that's an excellent foundation.
Imagine becoming familiar with a house, learning where to look and gradually developing your own methods. Then a new shopping list forces you to reconsider what matters. Suddenly, an ordinary kitchen could become more important than a room full of valuables.
But there's an obvious danger. If the changing objectives don't produce genuinely different decisions, the criminal fantasy might eventually collapse into a shopping simulator with trespassing. Today, the dog wants sausages. Tomorrow, perhaps somebody wants a book. The following day, another person requests something equally ridiculous. At some point, you might begin wondering why you're risking imprisonment when these people could simply go to the bloody supermarket.
The opening robbery doesn't answer that question yet. It demonstrates that searching a house, interacting with its contents and escaping with the required goods can be entertaining. It doesn't prove that the same process will remain interesting after repeated attempts.
For that, the game needs more than different objects on a list. It needs those objectives to change how you approach the robbery. The advertised security systems, environmental physics and progression could help provide that variety, but their lasting impact remains untested here. I want to see whether becoming a better burglar actually feels rewarding, or whether I'll simply become increasingly efficient at fetching groceries for animals.
First Look Verdict: A Surprisingly Promising Life of Petty Crime
I went into Loot List expecting a fairly simple robbery simulator. I didn't expect to laugh at a toddler's shape puzzle, become involved in canine sausage trafficking or discover that my greatest criminal liability might be a carton of milk. Yet underneath all that nonsense, there's something promising.
The first house was genuinely fun to explore. The ten-minute limit gave the robbery some urgency, the interactions encouraged curiosity, and the game's ridiculous characters made the objectives far more memorable than another anonymous instruction to steal something expensive.
The unclear interactions need refinement, controller support didn't behave properly during my session, and there's still a significant question hanging over mission variety and long-term progression. But for a free demo, this is an encouraging first impression.
Loot List: Thief Sim is available as a free demo on Steam, with the full game still unreleased. I'd recommend giving it a try if you enjoy smaller-scale burglary games with a healthy disregard for common sense.
Just remember that while other criminal masterminds are planning elaborate heists and laundering millions through offshore accounts, you'll be standing in a stranger's kitchen, wondering whether you've cooked a sausage properly. And somewhere outside, a dog is waiting for his order.
Had enough of stealing groceries? Time to aim higher. Explore CRIMENET's Heist Games Hub for bank robberies, criminal crews, stealth jobs and ambitious schemes that usually collapse because somebody forgot the bloody drill.
Loot List: Thief Sim FAQ
Is Loot List: Thief Sim free to play?
The full game isn't free, but a free demo is available on Steam. It lets you experience the game's burglary mechanics before release.
Can you play Loot List: Thief Sim solo?
Yes. The demo supports solo play, and the opening robbery is enjoyable without teammates. Cooperative play is advertised, but its quality hasn't been evaluated in this First Look.
Does Loot List: Thief Sim support controllers?
Controller support is advertised, but it didn't work properly during our demo session. We switched to keyboard and mouse, which proved more practical.
How long do robberies last in Loot List?
The first house robbery has a ten-minute time limit. This adds urgency to searching rooms, collecting the requested items and escaping. Other mission timers haven't been verified.
Is Loot List: Thief Sim worth playing?
Based on the opening solo robbery, yes. The demo offers entertaining burglary mechanics, absurd objectives and genuinely funny characters. However, mission variety, progression and long-term replayability still need further testing.
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