Expelled! Review

Have you ever wanted to experience a Groundhog Day style of time travel but have it set in an English private Catholic school? Well Expelled! will certainly be the game for you! While this seems like a very strange concept, Inkle pulls it off in a way that is just as fun as Overboard! their previous game. After the excellent reviews from A Highland Song and Overboard! it is no surprise that their newest point-and-click adventure game, Expelled!, is a fun follow-up that is full of mystery.

The story of Expelled! is simple enough on the surface. You play as Verity Amersham, a girl at an English private school who appears to be the only girl who is in attendance on a scholarship. This is a sore point for Verity and her schooling as it comes up with almost every character she speaks to in the school, whether it be from the teacher, the Matron who is also the nurse, and the other students, even the nice ones seem to hold prejudice about this.

Verity is immediately accused of pushing a fellow classmate, Louisa Hardcastle, out of the Rose Window. This is already a very harsh accusation and a fantastic way to open a game at a very shocking moment, but it should also be noted that there are even more levels to this, with the Rose Window being the one that was broken in this process. The Rose Window is a stained glass window that is attributed to the immaculate conception of one of the original nuns who has a statue dedicated to her on the Quad.

In the opening of the game, Verity is expelled by The Owl, the nickname for the scary headteacher, Tabitha Mulligatawney. The Owl is a harsh woman who seems to take no prisoners when she expels Verity, immediately becoming an antagonist to the player in a way that demonstrates the great characterization you will experience throughout this game: Clear and concise characters.

After her expulsion, Verity meets her dad in the local pub. He was visiting the school anyway for the prize ceremony that night, and he asked her how and why she was expelled. This is when the main part of the story begins. Verity tells the story as a playable event, which is the bulk of the game. You start with Verity waking up in her dorm room with her bunkmate snoozing below her on her own bed.

From here, you have a series of choices to make. Do you look at your cuddly toy? If you do, you will find a note asking you to meet at the library. Do you brush your hair? This will reveal a piece of blue glass in your hair. Looking out your window can lead you to seeing The Owl standing in the courtyard and looking up at the Rose Window.

These are all small choices you can make before your roommate wakes up and you chat with her. Your roommate, Nattie, is a strange Russian girl with a complicated past you can learn more about throughout the game. She is unique and has a funny personality. Nattie lets you know you are late for morning prayers in the chapel, and you make your way together.

There are still more choices here. Do you head to the Quad and meet new characters, such as Fifi, a French girl who hates Verity because she wants her role in the school's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream? Or Miss Lemon, the Latin teacher who seems to be the most caring of the adults at the school? And there is Bridget, one of the quiet girls who is very sweet and one of the most academically confident.

The characters are really well fleshed out and add a lot to the story, especially some of the more unique and unusual ones you meet later on. After the Hymns in the chapel, The Owl comes in and announces the broken Rose Window. Fifi is immediately worried about Louisa, who was in the library near the Rose Window earlier in the morning. It is at this point that Bridget announces she went to the library this morning and found Verity's hockey stick right next to the broken window.

The Matron drags Verity to the head teacher's office and tells her to speak to The Owl about what happened. The opening scene of Verity being expelled for pushing Louisa out the window is then repeated, and the game cuts back to Verity telling her dad what happened.

It is here that Expelled! shows you the type of game it will be. Verity's dad calls her out for lying about what happened, and the day starts again. This time, you are in the library with Louisa, and you see what really happened. It is from here that the story can go pretty much anywhere. Expelled! encourages you to play the loop over and over with new challenges as you earn more information. You have to try to spend your time attempting not to get expelled and finding out who may have set you up.

The ways in which the story can take you are amazing. There is a very strange route that involves some very odd hallucinations with an owl (not the head teacher, The Owl, just a stuffed owl in her office), who appears to be some sort of manifestation of the devil. It is a very strange route and is the only one I have found so far that ends with a death rather than an expulsion.

There are also many secrets to be found. There are secrets about Louisa and why she may have fallen, been pushed, or jumped from the Rose Window. There are also secrets in the local tavern, the same one you are telling the story to your dad in the framing device for the narrative. And this doesn't even scratch the surface; wait until you find what is under the school or what the statue in the Quad has to say while you are standing near her (this is the same one who was impregnated miraculously by staring at the Rose Window, so she definitely has a lot of strange things to say).

The story is a lot of fun, and the more you play through it, the more you learn and yet the more questions you have. Framing the narrative in Expelled! around the main character telling false stories while the player tries to discover the truth is a great way to discover the story and unlock the mysteries as you go. It is a really well-written story with seemingly endless paths left for you to take.

The characters are a lot of fun. Verity is a really well-written main character. Often, a playable character in a game with a lot of choices can feel a little hollow, leaving the player having to do too much of the heavy lifting with the characterization. This is not the case in Expelled!; however, Verity has a lot of very witty options to choose from, making her seem like a clever and fun character in most of the options you can choose from. The side characters are also fleshed out just as well, adding a lot to the narrative of the game.

The gameplay in Expelled! facilitates the story really well. The dialogue is clicked through, so you can easily speed through sections you have already seen, meaning you don't get bored having to see them over and over again. The choices you chose last time are also highlighted in green, which is a great way to let you move through these scenes without having to memorize a certain path to get the same result.

There is a naughty meter you can add to through certain choices. These options will be highlighted in red and will tell you how many cheeky points they add to your meter. There are also passive actions that can add or detract from this meter; for example, going to the chapel with the rest of the class can make the naughty meter go down while skipping class will have the opposite effect.

There is a clock at the top of the screen that tells you the time that passes as you talk to different characters and walk from locations around the school. There is a timetable in your dorm room where you can decide if you will follow or skip a certain class to work out more of the mystery of what happened to Louisa while trying to prevent your expulsion.

Rather than walking around the school physically, you are pulled out to a map view and select the location you want to travel to. This works really well as the time still ticks by with the amount of time you would have spent walking to that area, but it does not waste your time with the actual walking around. This is great as there is a lot of replaying and backtracking to be conscious of the player's time, which is a really important way of keeping the engagement of the player nice and high.

The player has a small inventory to keep track of, which, like everything else in the game, resets when you are expelled and starts the run again. Some of the things you can collect in the inventory are perfectly normal, but others are very strange, such as the glass you can find in your hair or a voodoo doll you are given from a sickly girl in the infirmary. It is a very strange experience.

The graphics in Expelled! are very well suited to the point-and-click gameplay it accompanies. The characters are very stylized, and this works perfectly as it tells you most of what you need to know about every character before you even hear them speak. The school is also really well designed, with ornate buildings that all seem to hold a suitably creepy amount of secrets everywhere you go.

The more strange and unnerving moments are also really well-designed. The owl (again, not The Owl, just the weird stuffed vision of an owl that was probably caused by ingesting a dangerous substance) is a great example of the unnerving imagery being surrounded by very funny text in a great juxtaposition.

Expelled! is not fully voice acted, although there are moments where Verity is thinking is voice acted. Initially, I felt the lack of voice acting was a missed opportunity to add a lot more character to the game. However, with all the repeated scenes, you end up spreading through a large portion of the dialogue, and attempting to do this with voice acting would likely end up being very annoying.

The sound and musical choices in Expelled! are great. The game's opening includes a rendition of Flight of the Bumblebee, which is a comedic choice in the chaotic opening. The sound is really good in other moments, too, like the inclusion of unnerving sounds in some very creepy tunnels.

Expelled! is a lot of fun if you are into a Groundhog Day story of mild insanity taking place in a seemingly mundane setting, yet you scratch the surface just a bit, and you get to see the wild twists and turns that lie beneath. The gameplay perfectly carries the exciting narrative, and both the art style and sound design create a full world you can explore with a great little mystery to unearth.