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.
The Flower Collectors reviewDeveloper: Mi’pu’mi GamesPublisher: Mi’pu’mi GamesPlatform: Reviewed on PCAvailability: Out now on PC
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”.
The Flower Collectors Announcement Trailer Watch on YouTube
It’s a great idea, the story being modernised by its use of the past, and it makes for a mostly engrossing one at that. You’re placed right along the moral fault line as Jorge, a forcefully retired police officer investigating this murder out of pure moral duty but doing so, you soon realise, against your own, earlier values, against your old friends, and against who you thought you were. It turns out your old self can’t put up much of an argument – this game is not subtle in its parable, as much as the parable is worth telling – but the story becomes one of redemption as much as revelation, forgiveness as much as clear right and wrong. In this sense it’s quite deftly handled: through gradual realisations, points of reflection, moments of genuine and human conflict. And it’s delivered at a steady but still genuinely quite gripping pace.