Two New Crime Games Worth Your Money This Week: A Russian Hitman and an Alien with Catastrophic Debts
Short answer: buy Scarecrow: 90s Crime Story if you want to be a proper criminal, and JOHN GLEEP if you want to be a criminal who has made one of the worst financial decisions in the history of the galaxy. Steam released roughly sixty crime-flavoured things this week, and these are the only two with a premise we could verify and a crowd to prove people care. The rest was either not our business or too new to know.
Want a criminal career with more evidence behind it? See what Probably Stolen gets right about running a crooked business, from fencing stolen goods to keeping the police suspiciously fond of you. Unfortunately, the landlord remains undefeated.
Scarecrow: 90s Crime Story
Every hitman game quietly assumes the killer has no life. He appears, he kills, he vanishes, and nobody in the story ever wonders where he parks. Scarecrow is more ambitious and more terrifying, because by day you are an ordinary resident of a crime-ridden town of humans and animals, and by night you are a hitman trying to uncover your own buried past. That means a murderer with obligations. It is an adventure crossed with a top-down shooter, set in the gangster Russia of the 90s, and Steam Hype’s own summary calls it a grim Slavic gangster tale in the Hotline Miami mould, starring animals, delivered with the calm of someone who stopped being surprised years ago. You can grab it at 20% off until 26 November.
Imagine finishing a contract at 2am, then being expected to make small talk with the neighbours at 8am while trying to work out whether last night’s work is still visible on your shoes. That is the most relatable criminal fantasy anyone has pitched in years, because the hard part of crime is not the crime, it is Tuesday. Whether the game actually delivers that tension, or turns the day into a waiting room between murders, is the whole question, and a playthrough has to answer it.
The numbers are promising: an 86.67% rating. We don’t know how many reviews sit behind that percentage, so read it as encouragement, not a verdict.
Not prepared to gamble your evening on two newcomers? Browse our 25 Best Crime Games of 2026, from professional assassins to criminal empires and spectacularly incompetent bank robbers. Plenty of established ways to ruin a perfectly respectable life.
JOHN GLEEP
Now the one that can only be explained by reading out the plot slowly and watching your face. John Gleep is a tiny alien whose casino has failed and who owes the mob a galaxy. The solution is an action roguelike built around pachinko, in which you pay off space debts by abducting gamblers.
Picture the creditor meeting, which is hypothetical, but not by much. “We owe the mob a galaxy.” “Solution?” “Pachinko, and we kidnap the people who play it.” Nobody in the room objects, and that is the most impressive part. A failing casino, an interstellar loan shark, and a repayment strategy that treats your own customer base as stock. It is a protection racket with a hyperdrive, and the hyperdrive is doing real work: escaping to a new star system means more planets to raid and more time to pay off the mob. The tiny alien is not running from his debts, he is expanding the market for them. That is criminal ingenuity of a deeply unreasonable kind, and I mean it as praise.
It is also the best-performing crime-adjacent release of the week: a 90.39% rating. The fit is looser than Scarecrow’s, since this is a roguelike in a mob-debt suit, and a great hook with a 90% rating only tells us people enjoyed the start. Plenty of things are thrilling for the first hour. Whether the abductions stay clever for the second is the open question.
If JOHN GLEEP's intergalactic financial disaster appeals to you, meet another criminal entrepreneur operating in space. Black Market Space Station Shop Simulator lets you trade contraband while the authorities take an unreasonable interest in your inventory.
Everything else
A handful of other releases have crime-flavoured titles, but with one or two players online and almost nothing written about them, we have nothing to verify. In criminal terms that is a heist crew of one, and a heist crew of one is just a man in a mask having a very quiet evening. We’ll look again when we have actually played them.
Verdict
Scarecrow if you want to be the criminal. JOHN GLEEP if you want to be the criminal’s worst financial decision. The rest can wait.
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