Based on the walkthrough link, this doesn't accept near enough answers to make it fun.
Reviews for "HE BEAT HER."
zephyo responds:
it was made in 48 hours, what do you expect?
Neat idea, terrible format. Doing one action and seeing a fail screen every time, including the act of thinking makes for a boring and repetitive loop. Also, having a game begin at the end of a case makes the "remembering" of important things a really tacky forced mechanic. Would have been better if the game had at least prefaced itself with that basic info.
This game is about investigating, you try random actions and discover pieces of the truth, then put them together and use to close the trial in your favour.
Except that you don't have time to do that, because you only have one action and then the trial is over. Of course, you may use that action to learn something, and play again, but that makes the main character insignificant: even when he succeed he does not understand what he does, and why he does that, he just happen to do the right things and say the right words out of "luck" (which is actually the player knowing more than he does). Because of this even when you make "winning" choices there is no feeling of closure (i.e. "every part of the story has been settled) which marks the game as complete and gives the player a sense of satisfaction.
In summary, this "only one action" setting may make the game look cool and original, but in practise it destroy storytelling and hinders gameplay (it is really frustrating to be looking at the same "game over" screen every action you make). This choice and the lack of a clear ending (lot of story pieces were introduced but left unsettled, won't go into details because of spoilers) are damaging storytelling a lot in this game. And since the game focus is on storytelling (as with all graphic adventures) this is a big shortcoming.
How about better hints? What's the point of a game that you aren't familiar with presenting an undoable puzzle at the very beginning with unsatisfactory preparation. How about a tutorial?
I started the game, was given no information, and was asked "What do you want to do?"
Considering I'm a lawyer, and that these text games tend to be finnicky, I type in "talk", presuming that would be the kind of option that would let me talk to my client.
It then asked me "What do you want to focus on?"
Again, assuming finnick controls, I type in "evidence", to see what I have to deal with.
I am then given the weakest evidence I have ever seen (as in, the evidence is apparently that there was a bloody knife in the couple's shared kitchen, but the girl's medical records haven't been disclosed, so even the weakest possible case wouldn't be able to claim that he *beat* her?), I get an immediate game over.
After two whole interactions, with what I still feel were good choices.