Expelled! comes from the folks at inkle, the folks behind 2021’s Overboard!. In that game you were guilty as sin, and had to disprove your guilt in a brilliant reversal of the detective game. Here you have to prove your innocence, and it’s a whodunit of insurmountable odds. Expelled! is much better and more expansive experience than its guilty counterpart. There’s plenty of cleverness and bright ideas to go around, so much so that it deserves a spot on the Dean’s List.
As the game begins, you wake up in the shoes of Verity Amersham, a student at an all-girl school that’s down on her luck, on a scholarship, and entering the final day of the term that she just wants to see the end of. Taking place in 1922, you’ll need to work within the limitations of the time to figure out how to prove that you didn’t do it.
Overboard! was an inverted murder mystery, and Expelled! is a more traditional murder mystery, but it has plenty of twists and turns to be anything but ordinary. With only nine hours to unravel the thread of truth, Verity needs to do what is necessary to stay in school and finish the term. While you have several hours of the day to either prove your innocence or risk the titular expulsion, an individual playthrough will take you 30 minutes or so. From there you will have retry until you get everything right to finish unscathed.
This is a choose-your-own adventure where branches have branches, and those branches have branches of their own. Exploring is not only encouraged, but necessary to hone-in on the perfect strategy. It’s worthwhile to experiment or try things you otherwise wouldn’t just to see what the reactions are – some of them may surprise you. Now, succeeding on your first try would be rather remarkable, though not impossible, so be sure to explore all your options.
Expelled is what happens when you don’t win, so you’ll need to learn character behaviors, schedules, and interests in order to gain their trust or deflect the blame. The main antagonist is the headmistress, Miss Mulligatawny. Along the way, there will be many others that will reveal their agenda, and you’ll know how to use that against them. To do that, Verity will have to alter her character through her responses. The more veracious, you go from “perfect” to everything but like cheeky to silly,
While there aren’t many locations, there’s a map that comes up to choose what rooms of the campus you want to go to, over time will reveal where characters are, at every minute of the day. This is how you learn their schedules, and be able to strategically link up with them to either tell your story, or the one they want to hear.
Verity is voiced by Amelia Tyler, the narrator of Baldur’s Gate 3. Being the protagonist, it’s a great voice to have, but not the only one. A lot of the game is carried through text rather than its voice work. But what’s there is great. However, what also works in the sound department is the game’s soundtrack, bolstering real tracks from the likes of George Gershwin, Louis Armstrong, and Bessie Smith.
As you inevitably restart the game to get closer to the ending you desire, you can auto-play (a fast-forward of sorts) through previous choices. It lets you accelerate to a point where you want to deviate. Along the way you’ll collect items stored in your inventory to be used at key moments and in the right way. Since you can repeat your steps fairly quickly to get back to where you were, it’s easy to fix mistakes or try new ones so that you can understand what’s important to have in your inventory. Perfecting time and items are the keys to success.
This is a more complex game than its predecessor, with its back and forth storytelling making it less straightforward. There’s a lot of things through pop-ups on the UI, things characters say, and how they respond that feels like you are being given useful information. You can do it classic style by taking notes, but similarly you can once again use the screenshot button reference things or conversations as clues to be utilized later. Hopefully you don’t relate to this exact experience, but it’s likely you’ve been blamed for something you didn’t do. But there’s nothing better than proving people wrong, or otherwise showcasing why you were innocent. This all culminates during the denouement, where everyone comes together to lay it all out, and for Verity to be vindicated.
Like Overboard! before it, Expelled! is incredibly novel and satisfying that’s high school drama at its finest. Just getting the right ending doesn’t mean you’re done. It’s rare, but this game’s achievements will drive you towards its completion. Expelled! is anything but academic, there’s payoffs aplenty for this incredibly cunning mystery follow-up.
A Steam code was provided in advance by the publisher for review purposes
