The Big Con (2021) is a game with some charming 90's aesthetics and clearly had a lot of passion put into it. so,, what even is it?

(story premise spoilers ahead)

essentially, you're a teenager named Alison (goes by Ali) who plays the trombone and lives alone with her mom in a "mom-and-daught" video store. every year, Ali goes to band camp to work towards her mom's dream of her getting into a prestigious arts university. however, the eve before she leaves, she learns her mom is being extorted by a gangster of sorts for approximately $97k, and if they can't pay it off, they're completely fucked and will be bought out by a chain video store. taking it upon herself to gather the funds, she takes to the streets and quickly meets a con artist named Ted, who claims he has the solution to her money problems and becomes a mentor of sorts teaching her how to pickpocket and get extra change out of cashiers and such. they set off on a cross country journey together to pull off a Big Con (holy shit !!!! title reference !!!) and go from locale to locale stealing and grifting their way into riches.

this is where we get into the gameplay. generally speaking, you'll enter a new area and be given a blanket goal, usually in the form of some money threshold to reach. achieve it, and you can talk to your partner and move on. essentially every npc can be pickpocketed, performed by holding down a button until the oscillating arrow lands in the shrinking zone on a pop-up UI. it's a simple, timing-based minigame that scales proportionally to the amount of money on the mark, but it gets old quickly thanks to how frequently you'll need to steal shit. to the game's credit, there is an accessibility option to completely disable the pickpocket minigame, though i never used it. you walk around, talk, and eavesdrop on people to gain information that is automatically added to your journal kept in your fanny pack. it tracks your goals, as well as exploitable characteristics of people that you can use to your advantage in conversation to con people out of their money. overheard someone's anniversary date and learn that their bags are sitting unattended in the lobby of the hotel? hop on over there and use the date as the combo for the luggage! shit like that, basically.

a lot of this sounds like it could be pretty cool and as though it may have a lot of depth, but in practice, i don't really think it does. after a while, the gameplay feels pretty one-note and almost pointless. it got to the point that it felt like i was wasting my time every time i actually engaged in the core mechanics, which isn't a good sign to me. although i felt it eventually devolved into chore territory, it's still a goofy little time. conversations take place on a very 90's background and Ali frequently makes jokes about literally everything that happens. is it hit or miss? yeah! is the game extremely camp? yeah! there's a fucking option in the settings to enable a laugh track. Ali frequently hallucinates a talking bedsheet-ghost (Rad Ghost) who constantly reminds her not to do drugs and functions as a hint system of sorts. that's a silly little concept! the story is predictable, yet it's strangely comforting with how dedicated it is to pulling off the vibe of a 90's teen adventure flick. it hits so many common narrative beats of the genre. there's a little bit of minorly gay content (wahoo!), and it's extremely casual and normalized, which makes me happy.

overall, this game is pretty silly and lighthearted. it's nothing too special, but if you're looking for a silly little 90's con movie-like experience without a deep plot, this could be a good fit. maybe i woulda enjoyed it a little more if i was actually alive and conscious during the 90's, but that's just like my fucking bad i guess. oops!

The game is pretty fun early on, the premise is original and the artstyle is neat. Comedy-wise it was mostly miss for me, but to each of their own. Unfortunately the game gets way too tedious way too fast.

Pretty much everything is centred around pickpocketing people, which is essentially just a quick mini-game you have to do about 10-50 times per level, so like a couple hundred throughout the whole game. There are other ways to earn money on each level, but these are usually connected with just walking around looking for stuff to pick up, or sometimes solving very primitive puzzles, and they never give you enough money to pass the level (meaning you HAVE to pickpocket at least a little bit, unless you do like a 100% precent run doing all the side stuff, then maybe (?) you can avoid it but come on - who would do that?). On top of that the levels get bigger with each one, so as there is no map, earning money the alternative ways gets monotonous as well.

Generally speaking - the fun of the game is pretty much gone after like half of it. As I checked it out on Game Pass I can't say I regret it, but I still wish there was more to it.

This is a fun little trip, but I can't help but wish for something just slightly more ambitious. The gameplay is primarily about collecting enough money to progress to the next level through either repeatedly accomplishing a rudimentary pickpocketing minigame that becomes tedious fairly quickly or getting people on the level the thing that they want. This usually boils down to a guy saying "Geez, I wish I had a [BIG PIECE OF CHEESE]" and then you go find the [BIG PIECE OF CHEESE] and give it to him. I'm of course being somewhat facetious; some of the puzzles, while not difficult, were fun in a casual sort of way. There's also a minigame to do with tricking cashiers into giving you money which is honestly even more tedious than the pickpocketing, and this one you can't even turn off. It's important to note that, while every level has more money than is required, there's no real reason to collect extra. Everything after a certain threshold is technically a waste of time, and if you're here for real gameplay, pickpocketing and tricking cashiers is entirely unnecessary. The game was strangely buggy; nothing gamebreaking, but I did get some graphical issues and discovered at least two infinite money glitches.

I wish every single RPG in existence would take note about how side NPCs just start talking when you approach them in this game, without having to be interacted with at all. I'm thinking of Pokemon games draining precious seconds of my life so Old Man can say "The variety of berries sure is cool!". As far as the NPCs go, there's some enjoyable background storytelling. The game got a few real laughs out of me, but most of it was just cute in a "smirk and sharp exhale" kind of way. That being said, the 90's references were pretty excessive; first couple times it's charming, then it gets obnoxious. As far as the main story goes, it's... there? It's more of a premise than a story. There's a twist towards the end which could've gone somewhere, but they more or less sidestep all of that to get to a quick, neat conclusion. I'm not asking for Shakespeare, but a little character depth and development would've gone a long way, especially with Ali's thieving companion. One weird thing worth mentioning is the character of Mari, who I think I must've missed something with. I was not allowed to call her until the very end of the game, but they're talking like there's been a whole adventure and a romance with them?

The biggest thing worth mentioning is the aesthetic, which is probably the main reason to play the game. Visually, it's just wonderful. I love the doodle look, the vibrant colors, the radical designs. The music is also really solid; I've had the main theme stuck in my head for a few days now.

I definitely can't knock this as a fun, one sitting kind of experience, but if certain aspects of the gameplay and story had been pushed further, I think it could've been much more memorable than it is.

Troppo lungo!

Gameplay - 2.5/5
Storia e dialoghi - 3/5
Ambientazione e grafica - 2.5/5
Musica - 2/5
Gusto personale - 2/5

Gostei do tema e da história .

A arte do jogo também é boa.

Voltarei a jogar mais.

Confesso que eu não tava dando muita bola pra isso aqui, mas esse é o tipo de jogo que só melhora a cada hora que passa.

A premissa é bem simples, e isso não é ruim por si só, tanto que, quando começa a ficar repetitivo, a dinâmica muda.

Gostei bastante da ideia de áreas abertas com várias atividades opcionais que acrescentam na imersão e são divertidas de se fazer.

Posso dizer também que a reta final da história me pegou de surpresa, não esperava que fossem fazer o que fizeram mas fiquei contente com o resultado. Nada de incentivar coisa errada aqui.

Só achei que alguns elementos de gameplay ficaram meio jogados, como se só existissem por existir, sem ter um valor de verdade.

É complicado traçar comentarios propositadamente vagos assim, mas a ideia é dar o mínimo de contexto possível pra não atrapalhar a experiência.

De modo geral, é um jogo daorinha que não revoluciona mas faz um bom trabalho em engajar o jogador e passar uma mensagem bacana.

Coisa de 4, 5 horas pra terminar, não custa experimentar por um bom preço ou por uma assinatura.

Tired: Uncharted telling me I'm a bad person for shooting mercenaries

Wired: My own crippling guilt after picking someone's pocket and realizing they only had two dollars

This was fun! Getting to be a rainbow-colored little scamp on a road trip to fake Vegas, robbing literally everyone in sight along the way. The game doesn't overtly dive into the morality of your choices, and I think that's the right call. There's just enough conveyed by some of the people you rob that you can feel bad all by yourself without the player character telling you to. This is not a guilt trip game, this is an "Aren't you so sneaky and clever" game, in the most rapscallion way possible. Like, when you inspect items, you just kick 'em. Angst!

~ ~ The lightest implications of potential spoilers below, but I do not state anything that actually happens ~ ~

I've seen a couple of reviews that seemed very upset about the story shift late in the game, but like... come on. There was a point less than 30 minutes in where my wife and I both said at the same time "Oh, X is gonna happen". With all the 90s vibes from the game, I really shoulda said "jinx". Do kids still do that? Do Zoomers jinx each other? I have no idea. Anyhow, I don't think the "reveal" (if you can even call it that) could have been implied more clearly. It's the natural, if predictable, way for this story to play out. Thankfully, random NPCs and supporting characters make the tropes more fun in practice.

The animations and art style are delightful, characters are wacky, length was perfect, story was serviceable, and the dialogue got a handful of legitimate laughs out of us. If you've got Game Pass, I'd say it's very much worth trying!