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

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 the golden century from Battletech, but it lasted 10 years and Doug was on.

A lost era, but at least I've been able to relive the glory in The Big Con, a crime caper about sticking it to the man by hustling, pickpocketing, and otherwise scamming your way across America. It's all for noble reasons, mind you: Unscrupulous loan sharks are threatening the family video rental store with closure unless you can magic up almost $100,000 in two weeks.

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

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.

It's a puzzle game, in other words, where the puzzle is figuring out the best way to con your helpless marks. For instance, at one point you overhear a flustered father ask his daughter not to cry about not getting the toy she wanted; he finds it impossible to say no when someone turns on the waterworks. From there, it's easy enough to figure out that what you need to do is steal the toy his daughter wants from someone else, demand an extortionate sum of money for it, and then start crying when you get pushback. The art of the deal, baby.

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't always hit—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.

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 on Game Pass, Steam, and Epic. Stay rad.