• Price: $14.99 USD
• Developer/Publisher: Mighty Yell
• Release Date: June 1, 2022

A review code was kindly provided by Mighty Yell. We thank them for being able to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

I grew up in the nineties, so I was pretty interested in finding out more about The Big Con – GRIFT OF THE YEAR EDITION when I saw that it was set in that time period. When I started the game, a theme song that really brought me back to the nineties began playing. I loved the warning about auto save, which included an explanation of a floppy disk’s function.

The Mighty Yell website has two versions, one of which is the accessible version, and their consideration for accessibility continued in their game design. They worked with Game Accessibility Guidelines and AbleGamers – both included in our Useful Links section – to help make the game as accessible as possible. Cognitive, visual, audio, and physical concerns were taken into account. Helpful hints, colorblind accommodations, dyslexic font options, and various physical assists for mini games are all great features added to the game!

You play as Ali, a teenager who helps out at her mom’s video store. The setting reminded me of visiting Blockbuster as a kid and renting VHS tapes there, as well as the “Be Kind, Rewind!” slogan. The vibrant environment and characters in The Big Con really felt stylistically similar to the great cartoons on Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon in the nineties.

Ali helps her mom out by recommending different movies for customers. At closing time, some loan sharks enter the store and an eavesdropping Ali overhears them telling her mom that she needs to pay them nearly $100,000 within 10 days or she’ll lose her store. 😱 Ali wants to help her mother, but her mom says that everything will be fine, and she should go to band camp and enjoy herself instead.

Ali goes out to clear her mind, and meets Ted, who tells her to stick it to the man by stealing from those who are better off financially. He encourages her to pickpocket people. The game will tell you if someone has a lot of money on them to steal, or just a little. This is one of the functions that has accessibility built in to allow you to bypass the mini game.

Ted convinces Ali to ditch band camp, lie to her mother about her whereabouts, and go on a cross-country stealing spree with him. As you run around pickpocketing people, you’ll also come across a bunch of different items, like stickers, costumes, or something random like a corn-themed vampire movie called “From Husk til Dawn.” These hilarious pun-based items will come in handy at some point, with a pawn broker who likes to collect specific items and will pay you for them. This collector will pop up in each place you visit. And some quests will require you to pickpocket people for their bus ticket or driver’s license. All of the items you find go into your extremely fashionable and era-appropriate fanny pack! 🤣

One of my favorite recurring items was the “Burblo,” a cute little plush character clearly inspired by the Furby craze. (I used to own the grey one with black spots!) You can sell the ones you find to people who missed out on them because they sold out. Several people will want these Burblos, and I don’t know what changes if you give them to one person over another.

Besides pickpocketing and finding items for people, Ali also learns the art of “changebreaking,” or asking cashiers to give you change for a twenty, fifty, or hundred dollar bill and then distracting them so they lose count and end up giving you more “change” than they were supposed to. I had Ali ask a cashier to break a fifty dollar bill and got almost hundred back doing this. Ted teaches you the different strategies for the mood a cashier may be in, which allow you to make more money without alerting them to the distraction tactics you use. If you make the wrong choice in an interaction with someone and they realize what you are up to, their defenses go up. You can put on one of your costumes to “disguise” yourself and try again!

Some cons will require you to stalk follow people around and listen in on their conversations to learn how their minds work; one man said he had a weakness for crying kids, so you use that strategy to con money out of him. Others will inadvertently provide you with blackmail material to use against them. And in some places, there are combination locks on people’s luggage and alarm systems for you to find the codes for when you walk around a location. I thought that it was cool how one of the keypads had varying extremes of fingerprint smudges to help you figure out the code and the order of the numbers.

Throughout your pickpocketing adventure, “Rad Ghost” occasionally appears to serve as Ali’s advisor/confidant. They’re supposedly “the nicest hallucination based on a former Music Television Gimmick Host and Arcade Video Game Protagonist” that Ali’s ever “met.” 😂 There’s even an arcade game within The Big Con based on Rad Ghost called “Rad Skater,” where Rad Ghost skateboards over/around obstacles and acquires coins. Another accessibility feature allows you to turn on “invincibility mode” for this mini game, meaning that Rad Ghost won’t take any damage upon running into obstacles.

What was a little disappointing for me was the lack of real joint cons with Ted; you travel with him but you split up in each area and con people separately. It might have been nice to see Ted and Ali working together more, with one of them serving as a distraction for a heist or something like that.

But I suppose it may be a good thing that Ted doesn’t stay with Ali the entire time, since he’s the one who started her on deceiving/blackmailing people and stealing from them in the first place. You’ll come across payphones as you travel around, and can call Ali’s mom and friend Mari. There’s an interesting subplot related to Ali and Mari’s friendship, although you tend to reach her answering machine most of the time.

Parts of the plot reminded me just a little bit of a 2002 movie called Big Fat Liar, which also featured kids traveling across the country and causing mischief (although The Big Con’s story isn’t completely parallel to the movie due to the main characters’ differing motives and problems). In The Big Con though, Ali’s misdeeds go to show what desperation can do to a person. Ali’s mother didn’t want to worry her by explaining their dire financial situation, and the teenage Ali resorted to taking a stranger’s advice on “quick and easy” money-making due to her concerns. Ali’s mother essentially lied by omission, and Ali continued the chain of lies in a much more extreme manner. But in the end, I think that Ali does grow from the experience, and I certainly grew fond of the world of The Big Con.

Switch it ON or Switch it OFF? While there are occasional technical issues (nothing affecting the ability to complete the game) and I did want just a little more closure from the antagonist(s), there are certainly more pros than cons (😉). For one thing, I really appreciated the variety of accessibility features. Also, the game made me reminisce about some of the good times I had growing up in the nineties. The environment and characters are all colorful and zany, the references are often hilarious, and there are a decent amount of collectibles to find. Maybe the real treasure was the Furbies Burblos we stole along the way? 😂 8/10