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The Big Con review: a rags to riches coming of age taleA thief in the night
A thief in the night
It doesn’t take much to pick the pockets of Ali’s unsuspecting targets. All you need to do is walk up behind a character, hold down Y (or 1, if you’re on keyboard), and let go once the seesawing arrow falls into the shrinking, but still very generous, purple pick-pocket zone. There’s no stealth involved, and you can do it in plain sight of other characters as well. Some folks throw in the additional ‘challenge’ of walking slowly through the game’s various locations, forcing you to inch alongside them in order to stay within pick-pocketing range, but it never gets more complicated than that.
THE BIG CON - Launch TrailerWatch on YouTube
THE BIG CON - Launch Trailer
Indeed, the only other wrinkle you’ll need to worry about is how much money your marks actually have on them. In a somewhat cruel twist, cash-strapped folks are easier to steal from than those who are loaded. The more money they have, the faster the arrow moves and the smaller the pick-pocket zone, theoretically making the really big moolah harder to score. However, even the wealthiest targets have a very comfortable margin of error, and I think I slipped up a total of three times in my entire playthrough.
There’s not much penalty if you get caught either. While you won’t be able to approach that person again in your current guise, there are copious dress-up items you can don in each level that let you have another go, because hey, this teenager in a luchador mask is absolutely 100% a different person to that other young girl who came up to me a minute ago with a glasses and comedy moustache combo. And heck, if you really find yourself having trouble with the whole swing meter timing, you can always just turn off the mini-game entirely if you want an automatic purse-lifting experience.
Yep, nothing to see here, folks.
However, as someone who did a large part of their growing up in the 90s, there’s something about The Big Con’s vibrant, comic book art style and scrappy protagonist that carried me through to the end long after the initial thrill of its puzzles wore off. It’s got a good heart, The Big Con, and Mighty Yell do a great job of capturing feeling at the start of a 90s comedy adventure film. Setting off on a big adventure to stick it to the man, MAN.
The train is one of my favourite levels, and is probably the one that feels most like a classic adventure game as you obtain items to get into different carriages and cargo holds.
Sure, that sense of righteous injustice does somewhat wear off a bit once Ali starts doing some pretty questionable things in her pursuit of her $97,000 - including, but not limited to, stealing from children, picking padlocks to rifle through people’s luggage, and giving out some rather dodgy financial advice - but it’s all done with light-hearted good humour and a wry smile. In the end, everyone is a valid target in The Big Con, and there are no moral consequences to your actions to dissuade you otherwise - apart from maybe deciding not to steal from them in the first place if you’re feeling particularly virtuous, but honestly, where’s the fun in that?
I don’t think this mall could get more 90s if it tried.
