Games

The game Expelled! is a rich addition to the wayward schoolgirl genre of visual novel, despite the odd frustrating moment. By Katherine Cross.

Expelled! a fiendishly complex adventure

Player character Verity Amersham in Expelled!

Credit: inkle Ltd

Good girl gone bad or bad girl all along? The latest visual novel from independent games studio inkle, Expelled!, lets that question worm its way into your mind on crackling waves of phonograph music. It’s 1922 at an improbably named English all-girls school and you – Verity Amersham, the most virtuous of scholarship girls trying to make good in the world – have been unjustly framed for pushing a star-athlete through a 500-year-old stained-glass window.

That window might also have magic powers. It’s the start of an Alice in Wonderland drama that sees you unravel your classmates’ mysteries in a bid to save your reputation – and your life – from the jaws of a very real oblivion.

The game presents itself as a spiral dance, spinning out from a relatively short story of how you are expelled for a crime you didn’t commit. While confessing to your worried working-class father, you begin again. This time adding more details and telling the whole truth. Again and again.

The result is a matryoshka doll narrative that builds on its own revelations and lore, evoking the feel of Groundhog Day or the glorious I Was a Teenage Exocolonist from 2023. It’s a game where the act of reloading a save and using your newfound knowledge to avoid the pratfalls that got you last time is diegetic. Much like Exocolonist, this is not a game that’s designed to be understood immediately – each cycle reveals new opportunities and new mysteries to solve in order to finally get Verity out of her epic mess.

The characters are all richly sketched. Your roommate is a dramatic mystic and a Russian heiress, your rival is a French-speaking swot who dreams of stepping over your corpse onto the stage of some grand opera, and the headmistress is evil in exactly the opposite way she seems to be at first. To say more risks spoiling your adventure.

It’s far more fiendishly complex than it lets on. Like most genius game designs, it takes some very basic, easily learnt building blocks and then creates trellises and latticeworks with them that require focus in order to follow. It’s not quite “a minute to learn, a lifetime to master” – it reveals itself more easily than that – but it is sometimes maddeningly complex to unravel. You have one school day in order to save yourself, and every choice and interaction makes that hellish clock inch forward, with one consequence after another piling up.

As in Edge of Tomorrow or Groundhog Day, you will use your hard-won knowledge to make your progress through that day as efficient as possible. But there’s another element: the game’s morality points. Verity presents herself as toweringly virtuous at the start, but, as she’s egged on from some surprising quarters, she can make choices that make her naughtier. This is in fact mechanically necessary: only a cheeky, naughty or even evil Verity can make the choices needed in order to advance the plot and save herself. Particularly cunning ploys, for instance, will reveal themselves to you only if your morality meter rises over certain thresholds.

It’s a clever system. In terms of what it communicates, writer and director Jon Ingold just manages to save himself from implying that evil is the only way to fight injustice. What emerges instead is a more complex and nuanced plot, where the working-class scholarship girl has to get her hands dirty to outwit people who are conspiring against her with the mighty offices of their privilege. In the end, she can still emerge with her soul more or less intact. Or not. The choice is truly yours, somewhere in the maze at the bottom of the mid-size matryoshka doll in this delectably fell collection.

It’s hard to say more without spoiling things. In the manner of a good murder mystery, you learn dark secrets and scandals, each giving you a clue that leads to the next and to the prospect of personal, and perhaps spiritual, salvation.

The game is not without its frustrations. As it requires you to start over a great deal, it can be dispiritingly annoying to begin a scene or a day all over again. Even the ability to fast-forward through various dialogues that you wish to maintain does little to remove what becomes a grinding sense of tedium in the mid-game as you search almost desperately for the right choice that will lead you where you need to go. Or, worse, as you have the crushing realisation that you may need to restart the entire day over again. This was the slowest and least rewarding part of the game by far.

Expelled! strives to reward exploration and poking around as, like many good games, it teaches you through doing. Sometimes the exploration is fun enough to justify that, but it does run afoul of some unusual design choices. Dialogue is occasionally baffling and frustrating. Crucial bits of dialogue don’t appear when you expect them to, or require you to drill down through conversation options that have no logical order. And each extraneous dialogue choice that allows you to maybe get where you’re going causes precious minutes to tick by on the clock of Verity’s school day.

There are rewards for those who plough through and figure out where the hidden keys are, where Verity’s filth book is, what lies behind various names and nicknames, flapping tapestries and shards of glass. It is, as is so often the case with inkle, a richly satisfying story – even if it unfolds with something less than the butter smoothness of the studio’s masterpiece 80 Days.

You will come to adore the characters and their little mysteries, making this game a worthy addition to the wayward schoolgirl genre of visual novel and ranking it with the glories of Hanako Games’ oeuvre, which includes the likes of Black Closet and Magical Diary. The game’s Groundhog Day experience ensures it ranks uniquely in the genre and it allows the narrative to spiral outward with all the satisfaction of an especially good puzzle.

What I was struck by, considering both this game and its spiritual predecessor Overboard!, which employs the same engine, is the running theme of women’s power in an age that seems designed to snuff it out. It’s impossible not to think of our own moment, with threats to the rights of women and queer people mushrooming across the democratic world. Expelled! is as much an indictment of the 2020s as Verity is of her own time.

Verity represents a flawed diamond of a heroine. She’s a woman emerging into a post-plague world that doesn’t want her for utterly inhumane reasons. She will write her will upon it anyway. She’s the heroine we deserve and the heroine we need.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 3, 2025 as "Schooling the player".

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