Expelled! review

As a horrible person, I was delighted when I found out we were getting another Overboard game. Overboard was a delightfully nasty reverse-murder mystery, a timeloop adventure where each run began with you tossing your screaming husband off a cruise ship. You then had to cover up your crime by framing others, outsmarting a Poirot-wannabe, sleeping your way to success, or even killing the entire crew. I absolutely adored it.

Expelled takes the basic bones of that game's structure and sets it this time in Miss Mulligatawney's School for Promising Girls, an elite 1920s training ground for wretched entitled cretins. You're Verity Amersham, the lowly scholarship student, and you've just been framed—possibly—for smashing a stained glass window. Oh, and shoving another girl out of it. You have until the end of the school day to clear your name, frame someone else, and/or discover why this happened in the first place.

That's immediately a more knotty collection of mysteries than Overboard's nice clean premise of 'you've given your spouse a permanent bath, now get away with it'. Each loop starts at 7:30 with that window smashing and the girl taking a tumble. To start with you can flee the crime scene (probably wise), or hide a crucial bit of incriminating evidence (oh, probably wiser), or even just mill around waiting for someone to catch you (er…).

Whatever you choose will carry a time penalty, whether it's exploring the school, talking with other students or teachers, or even just checking how your hair is doing in a mirror. It's a point and click game at heart, a pretty one too, just with an extra layer of time pressure. It gets stressful, particularly in the early runs where you have no idea what you're doing, watching time mercilessly deplete towards that expulsion deadline.

Not always an enjoyable stress, either. Splitting the difference between trying to investigate a crime and get away with it felt frustrating. Like the game was constantly offering me two opposing paths and then punishing me no matter what I picked because I didn't have enough information yet. Naturally the more you play, the more you learn, but the first few irritating loops made me worry that Overboard's much more immediately enjoyable magic had been lost.

Being a schoolgirl, Verity also has a lot less power and agency than Overboard's black widow. Authority figures constantly drag me to locations I don't want to waste my precious time visiting, bad behaviour is punished with essentially 'bad points', and I can't seem to kill anyone. Boo! What, not even that horrid brat Fifi Vaudeville who wants my part in the school play? Or my bizarre roommate Nattie who behaves like she's the protagonist in a tragic Russian novel?

Ah, yes, good news there—Inkle hasn't suddenly lost its talent for writing great characters. Melodramatic Nattie might be my favourite ("must my life be non-stop suffering?" she asks aloud when she can't find her slippers). But I also really enjoy Verity's poor, powerfully-Northern father, and Sal, the girl in the sick bay who may have supernatural powers that she's using to torture the matron. A terrific cast made that initial frustration go down a lot easier.

Then, once I did finally start making some inroads, my frustrations started fading away and a great detective game emerged. With every loop you learn more about each character's schedules, where and when crucial items can be obtained, and the benefits of lobbing an incriminating hockey stick out of a shattered window. Oh, but it'll smack that poor girl who's already fallen out of the window in the head, rapping me with more of those blasted bad points…

But it turns out, wonderfully, you want those points. There's precious little good karma to be found here and your bad points persist between runs. Once the penny dropped that Expelled wanted me to become an asshole, suddenly this stopped feeling like an Overboard game in name only. Milestones of depravity are steadily reached the more your sins pile up and these in turn unlock more options for increasingly bad behaviour.

Soon I was able to sneak into unattended classrooms and, better yet, throw increasingly creative insults at stupid Fifi ("you puffed-up cockerel!"). Eventually I was rotten enough to the core to be able to silence witnesses properly. It was wonderfully cathartic, after so many failed attempts at trying to flatter stubborn bookworm Bridget into keeping schtum, to be able to simply shove her down a staircase instead.

Getting through the day without expulsion is just the start. The game wants you to get away with the crime, stop one of your rivals becoming head girl, and even somehow snatch that title yourself. I managed a head girl run in about three hours, but even that's not the true end. You have a checklist of outstanding mysteries to pick away at, giving some welcome guidance without spelling out what you need to do.

Speedily skipping through dialogue you've seen before is intuitive enough and when you do discover new dialogue trees they're almost always entertaining and often shed further light on the game's bigger mysteries. Timeloop games are inherently repetitive, but the steady unlocking of more bastardly behavior helps that go down a lot easier. I can think of countless games where a replay would be improved immensely by learning I could now push my conversation partner down the stairs.

So after a slightly unfriendly start, Inkle has successfully proven the Overboard structure can tell a more complex story without losing the malicious glee in being a wrong 'un. A game that starts off as a slightly too accurate simulation of the frustrations of being a schoolgirl in a pompous boarding school steadily blossoms into the origin story of a horrid bitch for the ages. Terrific.