HE BEAT HER.

Being a lawyer might sound like the kind of job that allows you to help people and bring justice to those who deserve it, but things are not as simple most of the time. Hence, there are cases where the answer is very complicated, and it may not even come to light over the course of the trial. Hence, a lot of stress can ensue from such cases, depending on their nature.

HE BEAT HER. is a unique visual novel in which you get to tackle a special case in a variety of different ways, depending on your choices. In truth, there is only one choice to make, but you are free to type in the desired action and watch the results. Granted, it can be a tad disorienting at first, especially since there is no guidance to help you along.

As the name implies, your client is suspected of hitting his wife and generally being abusive, and your job is to defend him. On the other hand, proper justice might not mean what you believe, and it’s not always the best thing for your client. Hence, getting him out might not be fair, especially if it turns out that he is actually guilty and really did hit his wife.

Since there’s very little time to reach a conclusion, your first and only action is the decisive one. You can type anything you want in the input field, but obviously not everything is going to work. Hence, you can even go to sleep if that seems to make sense, as well as talk to your client or go into a screaming fit in the middle of the trial. You can find out more about the case with the right actions, so it’s definitely worth multiple playthroughs.

In fact, there are more than two hundred possibilities at your disposal, each one of which can lead to one of the almost fifty endings. They are not all extremely different, but they do make you feel like your decisions have an impact on the story. As far as the artwork is concerned, the game actually looks very nice, even if the number of drawings is very limited.

In the end, HE BEAT HER. is a bit too disorienting and short to really make an impression on you, but it definitely has the right idea. Thus, it would be nice to see a more refined project sometime in the future.