From Canadian indie team Mighty Yell, and situated in lovely Toronto, we have The Big Con. It’s a loving homage to 1990 pop culture and involves a VHS store. Hurray!

In the game, you must hustle your way across America after your VHS store faces a bunch of devious loan sharks. Oh my days! Let’s listen to some Wheatus and do this thing.

The Big Con and its Theft-Based Homage to the Nineties

Everything about this game lives and breathes the 1990s. There’s even an archaic Nineties styled website to go with the game: Mighty Yell.

Just the very existence of the VHS store is enough to make you pine for the days when people could run shops like that for a living.

Or not! As the plot to The Big Con sees you star as Ali, the daughter of Linda. The latter is a video store proprietor who faces a $97,342.18 loan shark bill she must pay within 10 days for her ma. Result? An impromptu kleptomaniac spree across the US!

Straight up we have vibes of self-aware titles such as Going Under (2022) and there’s a dollop of Untitled Goose Game (2019) here, too.

Basically, as Ali you go off pickpocketing (yup, there’s a central game point) and stealing your way to 1990s glory. You explore 1990s towns, rob people blind, and all in the name of VHS movies. Hurray! Here’s how it looks.

There’s about three-four hours of gameplay in this thing, with a focus on adopting disguises, picking pockets, and ripping people off.

This is all played for laughs, so your antics aren’t something you take seriously. We mean, after playing The Big Con we don’t suddenly feel compelled to rob everyone we come across blind.

It’s just a video game and we recognise its absurdity (honest, guv).

The art style is great. As ’90s kids, we can appreciate the effort Mighty Yell took to recreate the Beavis and Butt-head meets Ren & Stimpy type malarkey. And there’s a very 1990s soundtrack to go with proceedings.

If you’ve seen Dumb and Dumber (1994) you’ll know that thing has such a 1990s soundtrack, from bands of the day (Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm by The Crash Test Dummies, for example).

Some of it kind of grates as that never really was our type of music (although we do like Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm, just not ’90s grunge bands). But there’s stuff like this as well which is a nice variation.

As for the gameplay of The Big Con, we enjoyed this.

It’s nothing outstanding, it’s a single-player adventure game with its roots deeply embedded to a long-gone era of interesting pop culture.

The trick to enjoying it is not expecting a deadly serious experience. It’s casual fun and you just romp around causing mischief and enjoying the aesthetic and narrative.

But the gameplay does get a bit repetitive, particularly the pickpocketing element. The game is also very close to the jerk genre of games Untitled Goose Game inspired, another recent example being the mediocre Rain On Your Parade (2021).

However, we do think there’s enough fun going on here to recommend The Big Con for a fun little sojourn.

It’s available on Xbox and Nintendo Switch, plus PC, if you like the look of the thing and want to, albeit briefly, relieve some ’90s lark.