Game Over – The Big Con (#JustOnePercent 78/100)

Developer: Mighty Yell
Release Date: August 31, 2021
MSRP: $14.99

I’m not sure what exactly is driving this wave of 90s nostalgia, but The Big Con is here for it, and goes all in. Full of neon colors, and almost-but-not-quite point-and-click adventure tropes, you play Ali, a high school student who is supposed to be on her way to band camp, but instead embarks on a crime-spree road trip to save her family’s small video store from a mobster who wants to sell it to a big corporation. You and your new partner have just a few stops to come up with nearly $100,000, which is an awful lot of money for a teenager just learning to pick pockets.

I’ll be honest, as far as mechanics go, The Big Con is nothing special. There’s the pick pocket mini-game, where you need to click when the indicator reaches the small colored section of the bar. Hit it at the wrong moment, or take too long, and you get caught. Get caught three times, and you’re going to be rewinding video tapes. Yes, you read that right. The punishment for failure is having to rewind. Unfortunately, this doesn’t clear anything – anyone you failed to steal from is still going to be suspicious of you, and if you want that loot, you’re going to need to find a disguise and try again.

You can – however – turn on an option to auto pickpocket, which relieves the game of a bit of tedium and annoyance, but also the only real game play mechanic in the whole game. Everything else is rummaging through trashcans, talking to people to find out what they want, and figuring out how to get it for them. The puzzle elements are not particularly challenging, and most of the time if you just touch everything you can, you’ll eventually get what you need to move forward.

The game isn’t overly long, if you aren’t trying to do absolutely everything. All in all, it took me about four hours, and even that was perhaps a bit long for the story it’s telling. And make no mistake, the story is the reason to stick around. Sometimes I’d get a moment or two of feeling very clever when I managed to find the thing I was looking for, and use it to extort the maximum amount of cash from my mark, but mostly, I was routing for Ali to foil the mobster and save the video store.

*It certainly didn’t hurt that the entire premise gave me big **Empire Records** vibes.*

All in all, The Big Con is a charming little heist story, albeit not a very challenging one. If you like light puzzles, neon colors, and the vibe of the mid-90s, you will likely enjoy this one. Completionists might find the single save system to be a bit frustrating, as if you miss something in an early level, your only recourse is to delete your save data (which you can do from the options menu) and start a fresh playthrough. I enjoyed the game, but not enough to want to replay the entire thing for nerdpoints.

SteamDB estimates that The Big Con has sold between 6,100 and 16,700 copies on Steam. It’s a niche title, but because the description is pretty upfront about what to expect, there’s been almost no negative reviews. It is ranked 175 out of 10,967 games released in 2021.