Expelled! Final Impressions

Expelled! is a fun whodunnit that is an excellent follow-up to Inkle’s 2021 narrative-focused title Overboard!

The Setup of Expelled!

Set in 1922, you play as Verity Amersham, a student at Miss Mulligatawney’s School for Promising Girls. Boarding school life is tough; between friends, a scholarship and the field hockey team, she’s got a lot going on. The game takes place over a single day at the school, where Verity recounts the events of the day to her father at a local bar. It’s prize-giving day, and on this very strange and special day, Verity starts the day by dealing with a very troubling incident. The captain of her school’s prized field hockey team, Louisa Hardcastle, has fallen out of a stained glass window, and Verity is the prime suspect. If she can’t clear her name by the end of the day, she will be expelled.

Prove Your Innocence

The team at Inkle has made a few games that I have enjoyed over the years, namely 80 Days and Overboard! Expelled! is structurally quite similar to Overboard! The game itself is a narrative-focused visual novel. You’ll start the day around 7 am. Over the day, you need to discover clues that may help to absolve you from the Hardcastle crime and an expulsion from the school. You will collect that context by moving around the school while the clock keeps ticking. There’s a somewhat limited number of rooms in the game; you’ll have about a dozen spaces that you can explore to gather clues with a small set of quite varied non-playable characters to interact with.

I love the constraint of a relatively small map and character set that you spend a lot of time around. Although the number of characters and spaces is somewhat limited, there are tons of different scenarios that can occur between those characters depending on the time of day. Sometimes you’ll find yourself in the middle of a context-sharing group, find someone with something to hide or explore a part of the world you didn’t know that could.

It is impossible to get to an adequate ending on your first playthrough – you will most definitely have to run through the game multiple times to reach a satisfying conclusion. Each of these playthrough usually take about half an hour (depending on your reading speed). Some of the endings will make you laugh, and others will have you shaking your head (either in anger or in confusion).

Now Do It Again

During my time with Expelled, I went through the game 11 times over about five hours. At the end of my eleventh run, I had gained enough context to reach a satisfying but not perfect conclusion to the story. Some of those runs led me to large developments in the story. Sometimes, this came in the form of a breakthrough with a specific character, a clue that gave me more insight into people’s motivations, or an item that could unlock a path that I had not seen before. I did appreciate that the game has two clever mechanics for helping your character remember things that have occurred during other runs. One of which I will let you discover on your own. The other is the graying out of exact dialogue options that you have already gone through.

I have to call out the sharp writing in Expelled! There were multiple occasions where the game took a turn for the charmingly silly, leading to a smile or a chuckle from me while I played the game.

Eureka!

Getting to a breakthrough moment is easily the most rewarding part of Expelled!  However, finding those breakthroughs could sometimes be difficult.

I found that a handful of the runs that I played did not uncover any substantial unlocks or new paths in the story. This was derived from the sometimes limited interactions that Verity could carry out with items on hand and characters in front of her. In short, sometimes I couldn’t do everything that I could imagine, even as my character’s morality changed through my different playthroughs. In short, my logic didn’t allow me to do anything I could scheme up; I was put in a bit of a box. For a game of this scope, however, I understand and respect the limitation.

You’re Expelled!

I wouldn’t have done eleven playthroughs of Expelled! if it wasn’t fun to unravel the mystery at hand. Even though I couldn’t make every single interaction that my brain could scheme up with the tools at my disposal, the writing and mystery kept me coming back for one more run more than once.

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A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for this feature. Reviewed on PC.

Looking for another mystery to solve? Check out our review of The Rise of the Golden Idol!