One of 2021's underrated games was Overboard!, which followed a woman trying to get away with murdering her husband on a ship.
A playthrough was short, but it was a game that had to be replayed multiple times. By exploring the ship and interacting with the other passengers, you learned new information that could be used to help Veronica avoid being arrested for the crime.
Expelled! is developer Inkle's follow-up. It's a separate story, set a decade earlier in the 1920s at an English boarding school, but it follows a similar style.
The lead character is Verity Amersham, a student who finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. When a school prefect is pushed out of a high window, Verity is accused of being the culprit. Threatened with expulsion, Verity must clear her name before the end of the day.
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You're not going to avoid expulsion on your first attempt. Each playthrough is less than 45 minutes long, and with every run, you'll come across new items of interest and pick up new knowledge about the school's key characters – including students, teachers, and even the gardener – that open up more possibilities to help you to eventually survive the day.
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Each character behaves in their own way. Learning about people's routines and how they respond to certain conversation topics leads you to experiment. For example, you can influence when the prefect is discovered – maybe that can help Verity. Can you hide or plant evidence? What options open up when you skip morning assembly or enter a classroom when the teacher is not there?
And how can you use secrets about your fellow students to your advantage? Everyone has their own secret or agenda to uncover, which encourages exploration and keeps the game fresh, but more than that, these secrets can interact with the larger story and puzzle in interesting ways.
As a result, different endings become possible – whether it's successfully pinning the crime on somebody else, or becoming head girl.
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It's all good fun, but surprisingly I found the last few runs, heading towards the game's conclusion, to be quite linear. I'm not sure if it's because of my playstyle – perhaps my thoroughness meant I was a little ahead of the game at a certain point – but the late-game progression felt a little too smooth and straightforward, as I knew what I needed to do and ended up skipping time to speed things up.
Despite this, there are some good narrative twists. On paper, the concept of trying to get away with murder is more interesting to navigate than trying to clear your name, and so Overboard! starts off stronger.
But Expelled!'s usage of Verity as an unreliable narrator to shed light on her as a character – coupled with a morality system that incentivises the player to make scheming or evil choices – is fascinating and leads to a strong pay-off.
Verity is initially presented as a girl who tries to be a good student, but the truth may end up being far from that.
Verity ends up being a fun character to follow, and there were a couple of moments before I reached the credits that had me grinning.
Expelled! follows a similar blueprint to Overboard!, but ambition in its narrative design helps the game to feel rewarding in a different way. There's more to the story than trying to clear Verity's name. How Verity develops as a character across several playthroughs is the reason why Inkle's latest can stand out on its own.
Platform reviewed on: PC
Expelled! is out today on PC and Mac (via Steam), Nintendo Switch, iPhone, and iPad.
