Expelled! – An Overboard! Game review

• Reviews by Laura Cress
• Published:

New setting but similar enjoyable choice-based formula should ring a bell for fans of inkle’s earlier narrative mystery

When Jon Ingold, the co-founder of inkle, told me in an interview that they were making a game using the mechanics of their extremely fun murder mystery Overboard! but set in a 1920s boarding school, I speculated what it might be called. “Detention!” maybe? Perhaps “Suspended!..?” Or how about…”Expelled!?” Fast forward a few months and it’s a shame I never bought a lottery ticket, as Expelled! is indeed its chosen title. Despite my clearly superhuman ability to see into the future (what do you mean it was blindingly obvious?), as I started up the game there were some elements I couldn’t predict. Would this just be Overboard! with a different setting painted over it, or would the game try new things to feel fresh? The answer is a little of both. Like all good teachers’ pets, Expelled! has swotted up to give Overboard! fans more of the same kind of entertaining madcap adventure they already know so well. Its main new mechanic may not pass with complete flying colours, but overall the game’s charm and depth of choice means it more than makes the grade.

Much like its predecessor, in Expelled! you play as a female character who may or may not have done something quite naughty and has a set amount of time to prove her innocence – and perhaps even pin the crime on someone else instead. This time you are Verity Amersham, a pupil at Miss Mulligatawney's School for Promising Girls, and the deed you’re accused of committing is pushing Louisa Hardcastle, the hockey captain up for Head Girl, out of a stained glass window. The day starts with the hockey fiend plummeting to the ground, though it’s worth noting that unlike Overboard!, the victim here doesn’t die but is just stunned and left dazed in the rose bushes. (Presumably inkle felt a bit weird about a young girl being murdered.) When (or if…?) her body is discovered by someone at the school, you’re pulled before the bristling Headmistress and are given the rest of the school day to try to prove you didn’t do it or face expulsion.

Also like in Overboard!, when you want to move somewhere new, you’re shown a cross section of the school and its grounds and can move about any locations you’ve discovered, such as the chapel, your room and the school’s sanitorium (nursing office) by clicking on them. You’ll then delve into a visual novel-style scene, with various dialogue options to choose from, with each scene differing depending on the time of day – an in-game clock tells you when that is. Rather than operating in real time, actions such as chatting or moving about will move that clock forward a few minutes (or longer) in the game, giving weight to every activity.

Another similarity is that Expelled! uses the idea of a simulated world where characters move and act independently. So arrive at the library in the afternoon when Miss Lemon is about to give her Latin lesson, and you’ll automatically find yourself taking part in dialogue involving that. Arrive earlier, however, and there might be nobody there, so you can engage in some much-needed snooping.

Expelled! – An Overboard! Game

Genre:	Drama, Mystery
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D, Slideshow
Theme:	Historical, Whodunit
Perspective:	First-Person
Gameplay:	Visual novel, Choices matter
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Low
Graphic Style:	Cartoon

One school day takes about thirty minutes to complete and you’re very unlikely to tie everything up in one go, so repetition is the name of the game. Once you’ve completed a run, you’re given the chance to give it another go under the guise of explaining the day’s events over again to your bemused dad, who asks you to “tell it right” this time. There’s a nice mechanic ensuring that with each new run you can quickly remember all the secrets you learnt previously without having to repeat old bits of dialogue, and you can once again quickly speed through dialogue you’ve already heard with a skip button. As you progress and discover more plot lines and secrets, you’ll also unlock optional objectives like “make it all the way through assembly,” which will guide you in your quest to discover what’s really going on – and most importantly, get off scot-free at the public ceremony at the end of the day, where you’ll need to put forward your evidence that you’re not the culprit (and possibly frame someone else for doing it).

So far so Overboard!-sounding. But there is a new mechanic in place to spice things up a bit too: a morality system. You start off as good as gold, but occasionally you’ll notice a dialogue or action option marked in red with a number next to it. These are the naughty (or sometimes pure evil) options, and the number shows you how many points along the scale to depravity your character will slide if you pick them. Slip far enough down the scale and even more wicked options will open up in your next run, and so on through subsequent replays. The game doesn’t do a very good job of explaining this, so my first few times through I wasn’t sure whether it was okay to be doing evil things or if it was going to land me in trouble, or what, if anything, the consequences would be of doing them. Continuing down that road ultimately affects later retellings in a really interesting way, but once I figured out there were no repercussions besides unlocking more devious doings, I was happy to go about my nefarious ways in peace.

It feels like even more could have been made out of the morality system, perhaps with more dialogue / action options available depending on how good or bad you are (there’s only the odd extra option available in the first one or two runs) and possibly even having characters react differently to your changing reputation. As it stands, the system adds a little extra flavour of wickedness and choice, which is no bad thing. However, considering these choices only open up if you do bad things, if you’re hoping to play this game as a saint, then you won’t be rewarded for your safe (yet boring) choices, which some more upstanding players may find annoying. (Oddly, this didn’t bother me very much.…)

There are plenty of secrets to unlock in Expelled!, from additional characters to hidden pathways and dramatic backstories, and the game does a great job of throwing some quite frankly shocking and hilariously barmy twists and turns at you along the way. As you make your scholastic rampage, you can choose to pick up a huge range of items to keep in your inventory, from balls of wool to prefect badges, and one of the main puzzles is working out which specific situations you can use all these seemingly useless items in. Every choice really does feel like it might open up a whole new range of results, and I had a lot of fun tinkering with being in different places at different times, or swapping around certain actions to see what would happen.

The cast of characters for the most part are fun to be around, from our besotted Russian roommate Natasha to the bellowing, straight-to-the-point Matron. The comically over-the-top and entertainingly well-written dialogue helps with this a lot. Some of the writing may play more on stereotypes of characters you might find in a school novel rather than sounding authentic for girls of that age, but given the story’s frothy, camp nature (particularly a secret Mills & Boon-esque romance), this felt like a choice rather than a misstep. I did miss the amusement of flirting outrageously with characters that you get from being a grown woman in Overboard!, but understand why it might have felt a little inappropriate this time around.

The game looks great, with a slightly more cartoonish graphic style than the Art Deco version of its spiritual predecessor. Characters are given thick black outlines as if they belong in a comic book, but this fits the school setting well, with dialogue popping up in speech bubbles alongside each character’s face. Whilst there again isn’t full voice acting, Amelia Tyler, of Baldur’s Gate 3 narrator fame, does give voice to Verity in small introductions she provides for every new character, so we do at least get to hear what she sounds like. Sound effects of peeping sports whistles and creaking ancient doors do enough to keep you immersed in the day-to-day toil of being at school. Otherwise, the scenes are brought to life with music from various American orchestras and swing bands from the relevant era, such as the “St. Louis Blues,” a 1921 piece performed by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.

Final Verdict

You can spend as little as a couple of hours trying to work out enough pieces of the puzzle needed to get off the hook in Expelled!, but it will take a few more to uncover all the secrets that Miss Mulligatawney’s School for Promising Girls has to offer. I’d suggest you do use the extra time and be thorough, because there’s a lot of fun to be had in making like Robert Frost and taking the road less travelled just to see where you end up. Whilst sticking mostly to very similar mechanics from its predecessor, Expelled! does still have a few new tricks up its school jumper to make this latest installment feel new. There isn’t quite the raucous setup of Overboard! to enjoy, and the morality system needs a bit of fine-tuning, but if this is a sign that inkle are looking to make these types of games into a full-fledged series, then I can’t wait to see what mad, messy adventure they’ll take us on next.

Laura played Expelled! on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.

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