Expelled! Review – Review – Nintendo World Report

Before Inkle Studios released Overboard in 2021, I was never fully consumed by one of their games, even if 80 Days and Heaven’s Vault are extremely neat. The whodunnit time-loop narrative hook of Overboard blew me away when I reviewed it (and so did their 2023 game Highland Song). I jumped out a stained glass window for joy when Inkle announced Expelled! An Overboard! Game (that is how the logo presents the game’s name. I will henceforth just called it “Expelled” from now on). As evidenced by the name, Expelled is similar in concept: it’s a time-loop game where you explore a multi-room environment over many short playthroughs to gather information and clear your name of wrongdoing. The big difference between the two games is Overboard was all about getting away with murder on a boat while Expelled is all about avoiding getting expelled for a crime you didn’t commit.

You control Verity Amersham, a poor scholarship student at a boarding school in 1920s England. She wakes up one day to find the most popular girl in school in a rose bush after falling out of a stained glass window. She’s immediately assigned the blame and promptly expelled. Verity has to explain this all to her father, which leads to her recounting the events in more detail, revealing that maybe just maybe Verity isn’t a reliable narrator. That’s the core aspect that separates Expelled from Overboard is that you get pushed into a position early on where Verity low-key obscures the truth from you. She’s easy to root for, largely because her classmates are trashbag humans, but she’s incredibly abrasive at times. It’s a testament to the writing that this character, voiced by Baldur’s Gate 3 narrator Amelia Tyler, sticks the landing of being an intriguing quasi-anti-hero. Some of the challenges in the game are just getting Verity to admit things to herself, which thematically works very well.

The events of the game take place over one school day, where every choice you make takes up time. You can slavishly follow your schedule and attend classes or go try to sneak around and clear your name. Expelled’s scholastic setting is more focused than the boat of Overboard, largely due to the structure of the school day. It expertly teases you along, encouraging you to make different choices, focus on different supporting characters, and uncover huge secrets that can help clear your name. It also provides multiple goals to strive for, whether it’s answering the list of questions that the game populates as you play or the multiple endings you can wind up in at the end of the day.

Expelled plays some of the same narrative tricks as Overboard, but it comes off more like a song in a different genre from a band than it does repetitive or trite. The music in the game furthers that as the soundtrack is peppered with jazz music from the likes of Louis Armstrong and George Gershwin. Inkle knows how to nail a vibe and the vibes of this game are off the charts.

Depending on how you play the story, you’ll solve Verity’s dilemma in a few hours. I had moments where I thought I had everything figured out and just needed to trigger the right dialogue options, but even still I wound up getting surprised more often than not. Expelled is a tightly wound narrative puzzle game that makes me excited that it’s labeled “An Overboard Game” because hopefully that means Inkle makes a game like this every few years to wrinkle my time-loop-loving brain and completely delight me.