Expelled! An Overboard Game review

The arrival of a new Inkle game is always cause for celebration in my books, but I’ll admit I was somewhat surprised when Expelled received ‘An Overboard Game’ as an addendum. Previously known as Miss Mulligatawny’s School for Promising Girls, the name change did dampen my excitement for it a bit, because as much as I’ve enjoyed Inkle’s games in the past, Overboard is probably the one I’ve liked the least. It’s got nothing to do with the game’s top notch writing or deliciously villainous heroine, nor its frankly brilliant premise of trying to get away with literal murder before you arrive into New York by boat and face the awaiting police.

Rather, what did it in for Overboard was my own propensity for replaying games once I reach a reasonably concrete conclusion. You see, I managed to get away with murder on my second or third go back when Overboard came out in 2021, and when individual runs take roughly 30 minutes a pop to complete, it rather killed the thrill of pinning the blame on someone else again dead in the water. For me, detective games are at their most alive when I’m still shuffling all its puzzle pieces around in my head. The excitement of ‘not knowing’ any of its secrets dissipates the moment anything starts locking into place, and Overboard was just one of those games where I got to that point quicker than most. There are, of course, numerous ways to wriggle out of harm’s way in Overboard, but I never felt like I was given much reason to seek them out other than for the sake of my own curiosity – and when you find yourself thinking ‘Is that it?’ at the end of a run, that’s a pretty hard place to come back from.

The good news here, though, is that despite sharing its name and general structure with Overboard, Expelled is an altogether different kind of replayable mystery game. You play perfect student Verity Amersham, who’s been framed for pushing head girl and legendary hockey champ Louisa Hardcastle out of the historic, and very expensive, stained-glass window up in the library tower. Thankfully, Louisa doesn’t die from her injuries, but this deplorable act of treachery against the school’s most vaunted student is still enough to put you in the hotseat for instant expulsion – a fate you need to avoid by proving your innocence and finding the real culprit who did it instead.

It’s Overboard in reverse, in other words, and a premise that allows Expelled to become a much more traditional kind of detective game as a result. A crime has been committed, evidence must be gathered and presented, and the truth must be revealed with watertight conviction. It’s not the type of game you can simply freestyle a solution to on your second or third go, as its formidable headmistress, Miss Mulligatawny, will take some serious convincing before you’re able to succeed. She’s a wily and fearsome judge, jury and executioner who’s determined to see you fail in your final hours of term-time, and she won’t suffer weedy and frivolous accusations lightly.

Admittedly, if you enjoyed the playful and devilish elasticity of Overboard’s many-pronged solutions, then the idea of working towards a more singular, focused conclusion here may come as a disappointment. But for me at least, it rectifies two important things I struggled with in Overboard. The first is that Expelled keeps you in that ‘not knowing’ state a heck of a lot longer, giving you more impetus and drive to keep coming back and teasing out its secrets. There’s a lot to uncover here, from the personalities and ambitions of your fellow classmates to the predilections and need-to-know information held by Verity’s teachers. But the way it grounds you as a mere schoolgirl in all this feels wonderfully realised and well-observed. It reminded me of my own school days where rumour and gossip were powerful ammunition against your rivals and enemies, but which would be instantly dismissed if brought before a teacher and you didn’t have substantive evidence to back up your claims. So it is here in Expelled, too, and you’ll need to put in some considerable legwork to separate fact from fiction in the stories of your schoolmates, and for your teachers to start seeing you as something more than just another conniving pupil hoping to escape punishment.

You’ll do this in a similar fashion to Overboard: by going to different locations around the school at different times of day to either poke around quiet corners or interrogate anyone who happens to be present there when you arrive. Everyone operates on their own schedule in Expelled, and time will speed on as Verity travels around its corridors and goes about her business. Finding the right pieces of information at the right time, not to mention getting folks alone so they’re more likely to open up about particular issues, all comes down to the decisions you make in the moment, and Inkle’s malleable and reactive script does a splendid job of letting you take the reins in your own investigation. You can be a good student and attend all of Verity’s classes if you wish (the Latin test with your pal Nattie is a particular highlight if you’re after a good giggle), or you can spend the entire day nosing around behind the chapel’s tapestries to discover even stranger tangents about the school’s founding. Your time is yours to do with what you please – until the 4pm prize-giving, that is, where you’ll need to make your case and not be humiliated in front of the entire school.

I won’t beat around the bush – you will be humiliated and expelled several times over before you feel like you’re gaining any headway with your investigation. It took me almost a dozen goes to get right to the end (around four hours in all), but that feeling of constantly banging your head against the wall of Miss Mulligatawny’s unrelenting scepticism can be wearying. Indeed, there were times when I wondered where the fun had gone, as even the run where I’d successfully managed to evade being noticed, accused or implicated in any way throughout the day still ended with an instant expulsion come the end of the day. In these moments, the air of unfairness that runs through Expelled can be hard to overcome. But it does, at least, work quite hard to try and pull you through from one playthrough to the next – and this is the second big reason why Expelled works so much better for me than Overboard does.

It all comes down to the way Expelled takes advantage of its repeat timeloop structure to help feed and flesh out the bones of your investigation. The most obvious way it does this is through Verity’s trusty Filth Book – a compendium of all the secrets and gossip you discover during the course of each playthrough that instantly restores all of your accumulated knowledge the moment you get it back in your possession. It’s a bit like Outer Wilds’ persistent ship computer, or unlocking a new biome shortcut in Returnal. When you’re no longer scrabbling just to establish basic facts you’ve uncovered several times before, it not only cuts down on needless and repetitive busywork, but it also affords the player a lot more power and freedom in how they spend their time. There’s a lot less clock-watching, in that sense, and a lot more actual playing at being a detective.

But there are also dozens of smaller things that Expelled does on top of this to really hammer home that this is one, continuous playthrough as opposed to dozens of fresh, 30-minute pot-shots. It’s there in the way it frames the game as Verity telling her dad what happened at school that day, and him gradually calling out all the outright lies she included that don’t quite tally with his own version of events. It’s also there in the little newspaper clippings that sometimes appear at the start of a run to reflect certain breakthroughs you’ve made on your last go-around, quietly reinforcing that, yes, you are making progress despite Miss Mulligatawny’s ongoing rebuffs. You can feel it in your end of term report card, too, whose layered objectives first challenge you to make it through prize-giving, then the end of term, and more besides, with each new milestone revealing a fresh twist to tease out, and a new truth to shine a light on.

Heck, it’s even there in the way Miss Mulligatawny herself tells you on your second visit to her office that you’ll need to stand up for yourself if you’re ever going to survive outside of these walls, effectively instructing you to break your perfect, goody two-shoes status and be deliberately naughty with the dialogue choices you make, even if it seems rude or impertinent in the moment. It’s one of the best diegetic tutorial moments I think I’ve ever seen in a game, as it effectively gives you an open invitation to meet Expelled on its own, slightly rotten terms. These glaring, red text options may well chip away at your persistent ‘character’ metre over subsequent runs, but you quickly learn that being nice and good all the time won’t get you anywhere at all. It’s about striking a balance (or just becoming an all-out rotter like I did), and not letting other characters take advantage of your passive civility. It gives you permission to be angry and cross, all but hands you the stick to poke this very grizzly bear with, just to see what response you might get. And is this not why we play games in the first place? To push buttons and see what happens?

The end result is a story you can feel shifting beneath your feet in real time – one where that state of ‘not knowing’ is always pulling you forward toward its one, final (and frankly brilliant) truth, and where you as the player are empowered to take full control over the direction it takes. It gives you more reasons to keep coming back to Verity’s plight than Overboard ever did, even if the rate at which its answers eventually come into focus is perhaps a little uneven in places. Still, if Overboard was GCSE mocks, then Expelled is very much the final A-Level exam – a clear step up in both ambition and design, and a greater challenge to really put your detective skills to the test. A cause for celebration indeed.

A copy of Expelled! was provided for review by developers Inkle Studios.