Verity Amersham’s pockets are overflowing. Her school uniform hides a paperclip, a safety pin, two school badges, two books, a bottle of wine, a bottle of chloroform, a handwritten note, and more. None of it will do any good, as I have failed once again. Verity will be expelled from school.
I have saved Verity from her fate previously. Expelled! is Inkle working in their Overboard! mode, which Alice B so enjoyed upon its surprise release in 2021. Here, again, you play and replay a short 45-60 minute story, trying new ideas and learning more each time. It also returns to the interwar years for a different kind of pastiche of golden age mystery fiction: the school story.
The stained glass window at the highest point of the School For Promising Girls has been smashed, which would have been bad enough even if field hockey champ Louise Hardcastle hadn’t then fallen through it. Headmistress Mulligatawney will blame Verity if you don’t step in to save her. To do so, you must shuffle between classrooms and around the school grounds, from chapel to quad to the gardeners’ shed, in search of information and allies who’ll defend you at the evening prize giving.
It took me three goes around the school to prevent Verity’s expulsion. Why am I still playing? Because I want to not only clear my name, but make fellow schoolgirl Fifi take the blame. Expelled! has an unusual morality system at play, see. Choose the mean or cruel options and Verity’s naughtiness meter will increase and persist across playthroughs, unlocking extra choices in scenes.
I found the cause-and-effect hard to track, in terms of how my naughtiness opened up the possibility space, but I like the system anyway. Where Overboard! felt like a direct riff on the works of Agatha Christie, Expelled! is in dialogue with a spread of school girl literature, from Enid Blyton’s The Naughtiest Girl, to Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School series, to school-set detective fiction like Dorothy Bowers’ Fear For Miss Betony. Many of these stories are explicitly moralising, preaching obedience and manners and health above all to their intended audience of children. It’s refreshing to be encouraged to perform bad deeds within such a setting, then, and of course, even if you haven’t read any of the above, there’s still a subversive thrill in creating mischief at school. Skip classes, talk back to teachers, pocket that bottle of arsenic, crawl down that– Uh.
Expelled! is an onion waiting to be unpeeled and I’m not going to spoil anything in this review. I will say that although it starts softer (Hardcastle is merely injured by her fall, as compared to the deceased husband of Overboard!) there are darker secrets to be found in its musty corridors. There’s nothing truly shocking if you’re familiar with the genre, and nothing that would stop Expelled! being an excellent game to put in front of a teenage reader.
I do have my qualms, however. As I write this review, I have completed more than ten robust playthroughs, and have half a dozen dangling threads I still want answers to. The trouble is that the more tantalising tidbits I find, the more I lose my appetite for replaying through the story yet again. Expelled! provides an in-narrative shortcut to fill your protagonist with information gleaned from previous runs without players needing to repeat the same actions, as well as UI shortcuts for skimming scenes and repeating previous choices, but it’s not enough.
It’s too easy to have a theory that needs testing at 3pm in the school day, to orchestrate a chain of events and reach that point in the day, only to find there’s no option to say or do the thing that seems logical. It also begins to feel like the story itself is coming apart at the seams, lost in its own chronology of who knows what and when. Characters act strangely due to what seem like bugs rather than personality traits, or perform irrational actions that feel like contrivances for the player’s benefit, narrative coherence be damned.
I have been infuriated at times, never more so than when the pockets are stuffed with objects. I’ve found incriminating evidence, I’ve planted incriminating evidence, I’ve constructed alibis, I’ve puzzled out a web of motivations that would make a Grange Hill student cry, but it does me no good. I can’t present my case in scenes where it would make sense to do so, and whatever obtuse combination of actions unlocks a successful path forward has remained stubbornly illusive. Fifi remains smugly victorious.
I am willing to forgive Expelled! a few glitches in the matrix given the juiciness of its plot and the energy of its telling. I’ve ultimately had near seven hours of engaging fun with it, which feels ample. Now, far from its golden age inspirations, I’m relying upon that more modern phenomenon: internet sleuths. Solve this case for me so I can watch it on YouTube.