The Grown-Up Detective Agency by Brendan Patrick Hennessy
I haven’t played Birdland. I may have played Bell Park, Youth Detective during the 2013 competition, although I’m not 100% sure. The only Hennessy game I’m certain of having played is You Will Select a Decision, which is completely unrelated to the current game. I’m mentioning this because I have a sense that this game will mean more to you if you can place it in the context of the series it is part of; and since I cannot, my critical assessment should be taken with a grain of salt.
Hennessy’s The Grown-Up Detective Agency combines two completely different fictional registers: it is both a deeply ironic detective story and a romantic comedy. The detective story is committed to deny all our ideas of meaning and purpose; every single character in it turns out to be a parodic shell of a human being, and things would have turned out no different if the protagonist had done absolutely nothing. The romantic comedy, on the other hand, moves the protagonist from a deep abyss of estrangement from both self and others to a reconciliation where all things are made new. Juxtaposing these two stories is a bold move by Hennessy, and I love the audacity. Whether it really works is a different matter.
There are several areas in which the game simply excels. It is beautifully presented. The character portrait visuals are a great addition and deserve special mention. The writing is crisp and funny, managing to give us a whole set of distinctive characters in far fewer words than a less experience and gifted writer would need. The ironies about the passage of time are sometimes perhaps too artificial or obvious (folding phones, rising rents) but more often they work, and when they do they combine well with the contrast between young and slightly older Bell Park. Throughout there is something touching about the way in which the older Bell Park is judged – self-judged – through a confrontation with her younger self. This is not a detective game. It is a game about how we could justify our lives to our younger selves; and its message is, on the one hand, that we could not; but, on the other hand, that realising this can spurn us towards growth and reconciliation.
So there’s a lot to like about this game, but I ended up feeling that it didn’t quite work. One factor in this is that the detective plot and all its characters are so inane that they fail to capture our attention. At no point are we under the impression that anything is at stake in the investigation. At no point are its main characters anything but the butts of jokes. Several reviewers claimed that this part of the plot is a persiflage of heterosexuality, and the game seems to hint at this as well. But if that is what it is, it falls flat. Sure, some people may believe that heterosexual men have no women friends; or that they think friendship consists in getting drunk together. But those are extremely tired stereotypes which only the most skilled alchemist could turn into the gold of comedy. I’m not seeing that here. There was just shallowness and boredom in this part of the tale. The game was still very much worth playing because of the excellent writing and the interaction between the two Bell Parks; but the game wasn’t being helped by its detective plot.
The second factor is the fact that the romantic plot also doesn’t quite work. The protagonist gets together with Bridget. That’s great. I’m the kind of guy who cries at the end of the Pride and Prejudice mini series, even when I watch it for the fifth time (and while my wife is casting bewildered and dry-eyed looks at me), so I’m definitely here for this kind of ending. But the whole game is built around the idea that it is still-quite-young Bell Park’s confrontation with very-young Bell Park that leads to this outcome. And the problem with that idea is that Bridget is presented as such a wise and understanding person, and that the interaction between the two Park’s about this topic is presented as so limited, that we absolutely cannot understand why Bridget herself was not able to get her lover to see the truth. It turns out to be so easy for the protagonist to see the error of her ways, that obviously Bridget would have been able to show it to her over the course of a few soul-searching late-night conversations. And if somehow she couldn’t, then there was a lot more wrong with the relationship than we are being shown.
Did I enjoy The Grown-Up Detective Agency? Absolutely. Did it convince me of the truth of its fiction? No, it did not. And that’s why I end up a little bit ambivalent about the game.