The Big Con is a charming, funny crime caper about scamming your way through the greatest era in human history: The 1990s

(Image credit: Skybound Games)

In 2D, cartoon style, a teenage girl stands amidst a messy bedroom filled with �90s memorabilia.

The hidden gems of Game Pass(Image credit: Microsoft)We’re checking out the hidden gems of Game Pass over the next few weeks, digging up all the obscure and esoteric games secreted away in our subscription and seeing how they play.

The hidden gems of Game Pass

(Image credit: Microsoft)We’re checking out the hidden gems of Game Pass over the next few weeks, digging up all the obscure and esoteric games secreted away in our subscription and seeing how they play.

(Image credit: Microsoft)

We’re checking out the hidden gems of Game Pass over the next few weeks, digging up all the obscure and esoteric games secreted away in our subscription and seeing how they play.

If you weren’t around for them, the ’90s were pretty much humanity’s gilded age. Store shelves bristled with chemical taffies, nothing bad was ever going to happen to the economy, Frasier was on the television, and we’d replaced the tedious business of caring for real pets with small, electronic pocket beasts. It was like thegolden centuryfrom Battletech, but it lasted 10 years and Doug was on.

(Image credit: Skybound Games)

Ali, wearing a clown nose, looks angry and says “Is this why they tell you not to prank call people? Because you get errands?"

Still, at least if you manage to pull it off your video rental business will remain infinitely, eternally relevant.

Charm offensive

Garishly hued and dripping with era-appropriate ‘tude, The Big Con might be the most charismatic game I’ve played in ages. The whole thing looks like a lost Nickelodeon series, drenched in bright, wobbly colours and filled with exaggerated characters.

You, on the other hand, look relatively normal, at least before you start equipping the game’s disguises. Teen heroine Ali is an archetypal ’90s protagonist—sarcastic, precocious and resolutely opposed to anything resembling authority. A model scam artist, then

(Image credit: Skybound Games)

Roaming around a train. A speech bubble over a passenger’s head reads “So that’s why it’s called a train."

The whole thing looks like a lost Nickelodeon series, drenched in bright, wobbly colours and filled with exaggerated characters.

The Big Con’s gameplay loops are fun but relatively simple: Arrive in a hub area, run around looking for people to pickpocket, eavesdrop on them to find new scams, and in general try to wring every cent out of a level before moving on. Mechanically, it’s nothing too taxing, a combo of scavenger hunt (finding everything each level has to offer) and minigame collection—let go of the action button at the right time to pick a pocket, pick the responses that match a person’s mood to con them successfully, that kind of thing.

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(Image credit: Skybound Games)

A tutorial for pickpocketing, reading “Sneak up behind them and hold the button. Let go when you are in the purple area."

At other times, your job will be to distract store clerks while they make change for you, forcing them to miscount and hand over way more money than you’re owed. That just means choosing a dialogue option (from three possibilities) that fits their mood. Do it right enough times in a row and you can make hundreds of bucks.

In other words, it’s nothing too complicated, which means the writing has to be consistently on point to keep you pressing forward. Good news: it is. It doesn’talwayshit—what does?—but I was usually thrilled whenever Ali got wrapped up in conversation with another potential mark. She’s sarcastic and witty, which would be very easy to do terribly, insufferably wrong, but the game pulls it off so well it makes the whole thing look easy.

(Image credit: Skybound Games)

Rad Ghost appears over a mall info kiosk and says “Whoa, I’m information."

She never becomes an obvious and irritating stand-in for her writer, and the game’s cast of weirdo characters, like your con-artist mentor and the pimple-faced teenage boy who seems to man the checkout at every store in America, all feel like they fell out of your favourite childhood cartoons. Or your parents’ favourite childhood cartoons. God, I’m old.

If you too are old and want to recapture those halcyon glory days of your childhood, or just play a game that’s chill, charming, and funny, I reckon you should really check out The Big Con. Even if you’re in the springtime of youth, it’s just a damn good game that’s well-written and well-made. You can find it onGame Pass,Steam, andEpic. Stay rad.

PC Gamer created this content as part of a paid partnership with Microsoft and PC Game Pass. The contents of this article are entirely independent and solely reflect the editorial opinion of PC Gamer.

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Charm offensive

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