Rear Window is absolutely perfect video games fodder. Hitchcock's classic, self-contained thriller about a man solving a neighbourhood murder while confined to the four walls of his apartment has been spoofed and refernced so many times in popular culture, in fact, that I'm sort of amazed it hasn't been made into a game already.
Perhaps that's because Hitchcock, more than your Lovecrafts and your Geigers and other beloved inspirations of games, is a bit intimidating. It's not just a mood or a vision that you're riffing on, but a craft, and a very famously well-honed craft at that. I don't blame people for giving him a wide berth, basically, and it likewise means I have huge admiration for Mi'pu'mi Games, the small independent studio that's opted to finally take him on with The Flower Collectors.
What that studio has managed is a very likeable effort, even if it's not a perfect one. Instead of New York in the 50s, The Flower Collectors is set in the hazy angst of Barcelona in the 70s. The undercurrents here, rather than the moral quandary of privacy and domestic life of Rear Window, are somewhat greater: in the 70s Spain is in political turmoil, as facsism looks to take a worrying hold on the nation and police and state - in the form of the infamous Flower Collectors group - clamp down brutally on minorities, artists, and anyone else seen as an enemy of "tradition" and "order".
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