Expelled! by inkle Ltd

inkle is a developer that loves mixing clever puzzles and time limits. Whether it’s plotting the best route in 80 Days, deciphering ancient texts in Heaven’s Vault, or racing across the plains of Scotland in A Highland Song, these folks want you to experiment, explore, and above all else, try, try again.

So it is that we get Expelled!, a new narrative game built off the system used for the company’s previous success, Overboard!. Except, where that game tasked you with getting away with murder, this one wants you to prove your innocence…by any means necessary.

The Window

It’s the English countryside in 1922, and at Miss Mulligatawney’s School For Promising Girls, their star pupil has been thrown through a window. Everyone blames scholarship student Verity Amersham, except, as Verity, you know that she didn’t do it. The question is, how can you keep yourself from getting expelled for a crime you didn’t commit?

Acting as a visual novel with multiple dialogue choices per conversation, Expelled! tasks you with choosing the right options to keep Verity from taking the fall (pardon the pun). Every action you take, from talking to someone to rummaging through a desk, takes up a certain amount of time, and certain events will always happen at a set time unless you prevent them somehow.

The game makes it very clear right away that having Verity stay on the straight and narrow isn’t going to be enough. Everyone at the school has skeletons in their closet, and you’ll sometimes need to lie, sneak, or even blackmail your peers if you want to see things through.

This is where the game’s multiple runs come into play. You’re going to end up getting expelled many times as you try to get a bigger picture of what’s going on. Information you’ve found in previous runs gets preserved for future ones, and sometimes you’ll have different objectives to complete than on previous attempts.

That’s Why They Call It Window Pain

If there’s ever been a question about whether inkle are pros at this, the fact that this game works as well as it does should answer that. Expelled!’s story is layered and gripping, and I often found myself playing more runs than I had planned to as I dug up the latest bit of juicy gossip about one of its characters.

Combined with snappy, genuinely funny dialogue and great voice acting from Amelia Tyler (best known to many as the narrator of Baldur’s Gate 3), and you’ll have a hard time not getting hooked into the game’s mystery.

In terms of flaws, there are very few, but some are worth noting. For starters, like many games with similar mechanics, I did find some runs quite frustrating as either my attempts at new strategies didn’t change anything, or I felt like I had done everything right but still got a bad ending.

It’s not a problem at first, but by the time you get close to the game’s end, you’ll wish it was easier to skip chunks of the story just to retry parts you’re less sure about.

The Verdict

Expelled! is a well-paced, tightly written mystery that I think genre fans will find a lot to love about. It isn’t my favorite game from inkle, but it manages to demonstrate that they’re still some of the best at what they do. And if you disagree with me, well…hey, why not come take a look at this window over here?

Expelled! is available via the Apple Apps Store, Nintendo eShop, and Steam.

Watch the trailer for Expelled! below: