Across my first few runs through Expelled! – a narrative choice game where you try to prevent 16-year-old Verity Amersham from being expelled from school – my Notes app list of thoughts was mostly criticisms and little disappointments. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the game, I just felt like it lacked some of the deviousness of its predecessor, Overboard!, and it felt more like the game was asking me to solve a puzzle with one “right” outcome when I was hoping to muddy my way through another difficult, dirty, funny situation. I kept going, intent on finding out how to avoid expulsion and find the real culprit.
As I kept going, working my way through the same day over and over again to try and find the perfect route through it, Expelled! negated all of my criticisms. There is far more going on here than initially seems, and developer Inkle has layered their small world with many choices, discoveries, and storylines – all of them fun, and exciting, and often quite weird. You just need to stick with it and have a little patience.
The year is 1922, and Verity is in trouble. Louisa, an older classmate of hers at Miss Mulligatawney’s School for Promising Girls, has fallen through a stained glass window in the library on the final day of term. It really looks like Verity pushed her, too. But Verity knows she’s been set up – Louisa smashed the window herself using Verity’s hockey stick and then jumped out, possibly on another girl’s instructions.
Verity, who is attending school on a scholarship, is an easy patsy to a principal who’s looking for someone to make an example of. To avoid expulsion, Verity will need to find the real culprit… or at least pin the crime on someone else. That’s the set-up, at least, and to avoid spoilers it’s best to avoid going too deep. To escape punishment, Verity needs to trawl across the school and find as much information as she can about the other girls at the school, the staff, and the various goings-on happening throughout the day.
If you played Overboard!, the mechanics of play are identical – each action costs you a little time, there are expectations that you’ll show up at certain places at certain times (you have classes to attend after all), and on each new loop of the day everything resets. At the end of each day’s final assembly (if you make it that far), Verity will be expelled, unless you find a way to avoid that happening.
There’s a certain deflation to this set-up: in Overboard!, covering up that protagonist Veronica murdered her husband was thrilling, whereas finding the truth behind a crime you didn’t commit is a less exciting premise. Much of the joy in Expelled! comes from discovering the game’s little tricks, subversions, and reveals, from picking at the various threads it presents you until something strange spills out. If the first few runs feel a little muted, as they did for me, it’s because the game’s bigger ideas haven’t yet revealed themselves.
Over multiple playthroughs, you get a sense of the clockwork rhythms of the school. Your roommate, the delightfully scatterbrained Natascha, will be a good and loyal friend – and reveal her secrets to you if you prompt her properly. Fifi, your bitter rival, wants your part in an upcoming performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and will seemingly do anything to get it. The staff each have their own secrets and opinions that you can draw out of them, or use against them.
As you go you figure out when a room is empty enough for you to steal an item from it, when the gardener can be caught alone, the sequences of events you can commit to early in the morning to prevent being accused of a crime during morning assembly. On each run you’ll inevitably start planning what the next run will look like, what you’ll do differently, who you’ll antagonise – and then odds are that those plans will change on the fly, too.
Read: Inkle announces Expelled!, a spiritual sequel to Overboard!
Naughtiness and elasticity in Expelled!
As you might expect from an Inkle game, considering their impeccable track record, the dialogue and characterisation of the cast is wonderful. There’s a framing device to the whole game – Verity is explaining her expulsion to her father, but changing certain details based on your playthroughs – which allows for some elasticity with these characters. My understanding of this little world and its people kept evolving as I played.
Verity has a “naughtiness” meter that grows whenever you do something a little untoward, and in early loops many actions are closed off to you – Verity isn’t yet willing to reveal to her father the lengths she’ll go to in order to prove her innocence. It’s a clever system, and it deepens Verity into such a fun, interesting character.
I suspect that most players will have the same moment that I did where their perception of the game fundamentally shifts. I don’t want to say what the moment was, but it recontextualised the whole experience midway through. It’s a true “sit up a little straighter” scene, one that flipped a game I was enjoying into one I fully loved. From there, the game just kept deepening, revealing new dark corners to poke around in.
I’ve finished the game, finding the ending that prompts the credits to roll, but there are still mysteries and questions I haven’t yet solved. It’s a small game with few locations and characters, but it runs so deep. Your goal, ultimately, isn’t just to figure out the specific sequences of events – it’s building up your knowledge of how everything fits together to a level of mastery, and then using all of that knowledge to your advantage.
There are a few minor quibbles that remained with me after finishing the game. There’s no easy way of tracking information you’ve gathered beyond simply remembering it – your knowledge ostensibly “resets” at the beginning of every loop (although there’s a way around this), and while you get notifications when Verity learns something new this information is not stored anywhere, so it’ll likely be difficult to walk away from this game for a while and then return to it.
The Switch version I played also has a handful of minor technical issues – slowdown, some repeated lines, and one instance where I had to reset – although there’s been promise of a day one patch that will address some of these.
Inkle’s history with narrative choice games is exemplary, but Expelled! might just be my new favourite game of theirs. It’s surprising, funny, strange and deep, full of excellent writing, interesting characters, and intriguing mysteries. It’s a game that engrossed me so deeply that I found myself playing it in my dreams, then waking up and trying out the actions my subconscious had suggested in the night. This is a slowly-unfurling, narrative-rich puzzle box that deepens and grows stranger as you go, one that’s surprisingly, delightful, and extremely mischievous.
If you haven’t already, though, play through Overboard! first. Just trust me on this and don’t ask any questions.
Four-and-a-half stars: ★★★★½
Expelled!
Platforms: Microsoft Windows,
Developer: Inkle Studios
Publisher: Inkle Studios
Release Date: 12 March 2025
A
