The Big Con is a 90s inspired road trip/crime spree that sees players take on the role of Ali, a small-town teenager who loves working at her mother’s video store. Unfortunately, some money is owed to a large crook, and unless $97,000 is raised in the space of a week, that video store is going bye bye.
Naturally, the only course of action to solve this issue is a light sprinkling of “heavy crime”, and one of the biggest ways of doing that in The Big Con is by pickpocketing. The game does offer a tutorial on how to accomplish pickpocketing, and it’s certainly much easier than in the likes of Skyrim, but the game fails to tell you certain things that could be useful to some players. Here’s how you pickpocket people in The Big Con.
In order to pickpocket pedestrians in The Big Con, you’ll need to sneak up behind people and hold Y for a few seconds. Doing so will trigger a bar to appear on screen, with a line moving from side to side. Players have to stop the line by letting go of Y within an ever decreasing sweet spot. The smaller the sweet spot when starting out, the more money you’ll obtain from that person.
If you get caught three times, you’re hauled off to rewind videotapes for an eternity, which is more just a joke fail state than anything. You get an achievement for it, at least. There are other fail states for some other areas too, each with their own achievements. Sometimes, it pays to be a lousy pickpocket.
Something that the game doesn’t do a great job of telling you is that you always need to approach the target from behind, which makes sense. You’re not exactly a master criminal, after all. However, when pickpocketing, you can also use the left stick to move around, which is useful in later stages, as targets tend to move around a bit more than their slower, earlier counterparts. If your target gets too far away, the pickpocketing is cancelled, so you need to make sure you can keep up.
For accessibility purposes, the pickpocketing minigame can be turned off in the options menu, which means all you need to do is sneak up behind someone and press Y to quickly relieve them of their cash. It’s good for players who might struggle with the minigame due to certain issues, though it’s also a boon if you’re on a second playthrough, looking to quickly speed through the game and claim those last few achievements.
READ MORE: The Big Con: How To Complete The Shoe Questline
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