Expelled!

Genre: Visual Novel

Players: 1

.

Review:

(Note: This game is included in Overboard! & Expelled! bundle, along with Overboard!.)

Expelled!, released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2025, is a Visual Novel and follow-up to developer Inkle’s previous game Overboard!, although this game’s plot and characters are unrelated to the events of that game. In Expelled!, players take the role of Verity Amersham, a scholarship student at the fictional Miss Mulligatawney’s School for Promising Girls who finds herself as the main suspect in the attempted murder of a fellow student who was seemingly pushed through a stained glass window before falling multiple stories to the ground.

Multiple pieces of evidence point to Verity as the culprit, including the victim’s own testimony after surviving the fall. But why would the victim lie about what happened? Who else was involved in this plot to frame Verity, and how can she convince the headmistress not to expel her from the school even if she clears her name when the woman has been looking for any excuse to get rid of a penniless scholarship student to make way for a replacement with deeper pockets?

The game takes place after the fact as Verity explains the situation to her father, giving both a framing device and the excuse of an unreliable narrator to explain why you’ll be going through this story multiple times and exploring multiple different story paths. And much like Overboard!, this is definitely a game you’ll want to play through multiple times, learning new things each time to get yourself closer to a final, fully-successful playthrough.

However, unlike Overboard!, players aren’t going into this game with the benefit of knowing where they stand at the start. Where in Overboard!, you knew full well that you were guilty of that game’s murder and the goal of the game was covering your tracks and pinning the death on someone else, in Expelled! your first playthrough will have you answering questions about events that you’ll only find out in subsequent playthroughs that Verity had more involvement in than it initially seemed. The disorienting way this game has us playing a character without knowing everything she knows while trying to solve mysteries involving events she took part in can be frustrating.

Another element here that had me a bit bemused is this game’s morality system. Throughout the game, you’ll have opportunities to say or do things that would be unbefitting a respectful, reverent schoolgirl, inching your character up on an immorality gauge. The game lets you know that some actions cannot be performed unless you have a sufficiently low morality level, but doesn’t really indicate to the player whether there’s a cost or downside to gradually becoming more of a miscreant. Or, conversely, whether there’s any benefit to keeping Verity to more moral choices.

Beyond this, you’ll find the return of numerous gameplay mechanics that were first in Overboard! You have a limited amount of in-game time to speak with people, look for evidence, and investigate different locations, with every change in location and every action or conversation in a location taking up some of that time. Once you’ve gotten to the end of the in-game day, you’ll see the results of your efforts, and then return to the framing device where Verity’s father will push Verity to revise her story, knowing that she wasn’t exactly accurate in her earlier telling (which has shades of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time’s narrator stopping things with a “Wait, no, that’s not how that happened” when you die in that game).

I’ll take a moment to point out one complaint I had in regards to this structure – there doesn’t seem to be any easy way to restart a run in this game, such as when you discover you’ve made a mistake or wasted a great deal of your time on a dead end. You’re forced to let events play out until the end of each day, something I wish this game let you cut past and just go straight back to the day’s beginning.

Throughout this review, I’ve been repeatedly comparing Expelled! to Overboard!, and indeed it’s difficult not to do so since Expelled! is more or less a spiritual successor to Overboard!. However, I do think Expelled! is a more ambitious and complex game. Only that complexity isn’t always a good thing. There’s something to be said for the clear goals and characters in Overboard!, something that Expelled!’s unreliable narrator muddies. One can’t be sure throughout the game that Verity isn’t guilty of attempted murder, and is just trying to cover up this fact in her retelling of events. Likewise, while the game starts with an intense sense of injustice as most of Verity’s classmates and school staff seem prejudiced against her due to her poor background, the more time we spend taking her away from being an honest, respectable student and toward being a little hooligan, the more one can’t help but wonder if everyone’s hatred of her is justified.

I should mention the presentation, which makes use of a distinct, cartoony 2D art style for its characters, and is backed by a variety of classical and old-fashioned music to fit the game’s 1922 setting, ranging from the game’s opening theme of Swing Low Sweet Chariot, to versions of songs like Flight of the Bumblebee and Rhapsody in Blue, this latter choice being anachronistic since this song was first released in 1924. However, overall I think the presentation here does a good job setting this game apart and grounding it in its time period.

Overall, I like Expelled!, and I appreciate that this game has mystery elements that were either far less pronounced or weren’t present at all in Overboard!, since players knew exactly what had happened in that game, but will spend much of this game trying to get to the actual truth of what happened. However, having such uncertainty regarding all of the game’s main characters made it harder for me to feel like I could get behind Verity as a protagonist, as the game constantly seems to be shifting exactly who she is as a person, with all of the other characters shifting in relation to this. And while I still think this is an interesting and fairly unique Visual Novel-style game, I do prefer the clarity of purpose in Overboard!.

tl;dr – Expelled! is a Visual Novel and spiritual successor to Overboard!, with this game’s plot following a schoolgirl who has been blamed for the attempted murder of one of her classmates as she tries to prove her innocence. I appreciate the interesting mystery and complex and evolving narrative this game presents, though I’m frustrated by the way the fluctuating story makes it difficult to get a strong sense of the characters, especially the protagonist. This is still an excellent game, but I think I prefer the more straightforward approach of its predecessor.

Grade: B

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