Expelled! An Overboard! Game

In the space between truth and deception—that murky territory where identity becomes fluid—we often discover the most authentic versions of ourselves. Who we are exists not as something fixed but as an ongoing negotiation between our self-perception and how institutions perceive us. Inkle’s latest narrative game, Expelled!, transforms this deep human question into a gripping interactive experience that asks us to navigate the treacherous waters of institutional judgement while confronting how easily memory and truth can be reshaped. Like Overboard! before it, this game flips traditional heroic narratives on their head by casting you as someone in a morally ambiguous situation—yet it pushes into even more complex territory by asking whether objective truth matters when powerful organisations get to define what’s real.

Set within the prestigious but suffocating halls of Miss Mulligatawney’s School for Promising Girls, a centuries-old British boarding school dripping with tradition and thinly-veiled snobbery, Expelled! puts you in the shoes of sixteen-year-old Verity Amersham, a scholarship student accused of pushing a school prefect out of a window. The talented Amelia Tyler—whose distinctive voice brought the duplicitous Veronica Villensey to life in Inkle’s Overboard! and who many players will recognise as the narrator from Larian’s acclaimed Baldur’s Gate 3—voices our protagonist with the perfect blend of vulnerability and cunning. Her ability to convey both calculation and fragility, often within the same line reading, creates a character whose complexity goes far beyond what written dialogue alone could achieve, finding emotional registers that make Verity feel completely distinct from her previous roles.

With just one day before your likely expulsion—and the life-altering consequences that would follow—you must navigate the school’s complex social web, uncover buried secrets, and decide whether to clear your name by finding the real culprit or orchestrate your escape by pinning the blame on someone else. As I dug deeper into the mystery, I discovered that Miss Mulligatawney’s School harbours darker secrets than a simple case of student rivalry. The school’s pristine reputation conceals troubling historical events and questionable educational practices that become gradually apparent to the curious player. These institutional secrets provide a compelling backdrop against which Verity’s personal struggle plays out, suggesting that individual transgressions often pale in comparison to institutional ones.

Despite its detective-novel premise, Expelled! reveals itself to be much more of a strategic social puzzle than a whodunit. At approximately one and a half times the size of Overboard!, there is a substantially larger playground of possibilities, populated by nearly three times as many characters as its predecessor. These aren’t just faceless NPCs either—the halls of Miss Mulligatawney’s School burst with some of the most wonderfully weird and eccentric personalities I’ve encountered in gaming. From the pathologically suspicious groundskeeper to various eccentric faculty members, each character feels like they stepped out of some delightfully twisted BBC period drama, offering both obstacles and opportunities for the cunning player.

The game unfolds through branching conversations and exploration, with each playthrough lasting about 30 to 45 minutes—creating genuine tension while encouraging multiple attempts to discover new possibilities. Within this tight timeframe, Inkle has built an impressive array of narrative paths from a seemingly simple premise. The fundamental question—did you do it, or didn’t you?—branches into countless possibilities as you interact with the rich cast of students, teachers, and staff in this 1922 boarding school. Each character feels genuinely distinct, with their own motivations, biases, and secrets that create a believable social environment with surprising depth.

Subsequent playthroughs gain remarkable depth through a clever system where knowledge and moral choices carry over between runs. Your understanding of the school’s secrets and your ethical alignment influence which dialogue options become available in future attempts, creating a meta-narrative that spans across multiple sessions. Expelled! significantly improves how players navigate through previous decisions, with an interface that elegantly tracks progress while simultaneously beckoning you away from familiar paths. The game actively encourages abandoning safe, proven strategies to engage with entirely different story beats—a risk that consistently yields some of the game’s most memorable and satisfying moments.

Expelled!’s relationship system abandons the simplistic friendship meters common in other narrative games in favour of tracking how your choices shape others’ perceptions of you in nuanced ways. This creates a social landscape that feels genuinely unpredictable and complex—more like navigating real human connections. In a fascinating design choice, the more “naughty” or “evil” Verity becomes, the more options open up to her—a brilliant representation of how refusing to play by institutional rules can create new possibilities. This mechanical choice perfectly reinforces the game’s thematic exploration of conformity versus authenticity, suggesting that breaking free from social constraints, while risky, can open pathways otherwise unavailable.

The game also shows meaningful growth in Inkle’s artistic approach. The school environments have a painterly quality that perfectly captures both traditional academic grandeur and underlying psychological unease—creating spaces that both nurture and suffocate. Characters appear through illustrated portraits with subtle animations that reveal personality through small gestures: the nervous adjustment of glasses, an overly perfect smile, a dismissive head tilt. This economical visual style serves the narrative perfectly—suggesting characters without overdefining them, giving players space to form their own suspicions and alliances.

The sound design also contributes powerfully to its tense atmosphere. The jazz soundtrack beautifully evokes the 1920s setting while transitioning between classical motifs you’d expect in such a traditional school and more dissonant elements that emerge as the story unravels. Even the music highlighted in the game’s trailer brilliantly teases the adventure ahead—a seemingly proper period piece that gradually reveals itself to be something far more subversive and psychologically complex. This creates the perfect audio accompaniment to the game’s central theme: institutions with seemingly solid foundations that may be built on questionable truths.

The philosophical question driving Expelled!—how institutions shape our identities—appears not just in the story but in how the game actually works. Knowing school rules and social codes becomes a form of power, while your ability to convincingly present different versions of yourself becomes essential for survival. I repeatedly found myself wondering if I was playing as the “real” Verity or simply creating versions of her that would help me navigate this crisis. The game offers no simple answer to this question—suggesting instead that perhaps there is no “authentic” core identity separate from our interactions with others and institutions.

The game’s setting in 1922 isn’t just aesthetic window dressing—it provides a crucial context for exploring how these institutions control women’s identities and potential. Throughout my playthroughs, I encountered numerous moments where Verity was reminded, sometimes subtly and sometimes explicitly, that independent thinking wasn’t the goal of her education. One particularly cutting line delivered by the headmistress—”You are not the kind of girl this school aims to produce”—perfectly encapsulates the institutional resistance to female autonomy that permeates the game’s narrative tapestry. This battle against gendered expectations becomes as important as resolving the central mystery, particularly when Verity begins to uncover how the school’s history contains pattern after pattern of intelligent young women being forced into rigid conformity.

Class and privilege form another critical layer of the game’s social commentary. Verity’s status as a scholarship student places her perpetually at the margins—given access to Miss Mulligatawney’s opportunities but never fully accepted as belonging. This outsider-insider perspective serves as both a narrative theme and a gameplay advantage, allowing Verity to move between different social groups in ways that more established students cannot. I found this especially relatable from my own experiences—having been expelled from school as an eight-year-old due to a basic lack of understanding, I have a visceral grasp of what it feels like not to fit within systems designed for a different kind of person. That early brush with rejection gave me an enduring sensitivity to how powerfully schools can shape our sense of belonging and worth—a theme Expelled! explores with remarkable nuance and insight.

My relationship to the central mystery evolved in fascinating ways across multiple playthroughs. Initially, I obsessed over determining whether Verity actually pushed the prefect—approaching it like a detective seeking objective truth. But in later attempts, I realised this might be missing the point. The more compelling question became not “what happened?” but “who will Verity become in response to what happened?” This shift from external mystery to internal character development shows a narrative sophistication that feels refreshingly grown-up.

As I tried different approaches—playing the apologetic student seeking forgiveness, the wronged innocent demanding justice, or the clever manipulator rewriting reality—I recognised patterns from my own younger years when trying on different identities felt less like lying and more like necessary self-discovery. There’s something deeply satisfying about experiencing these dynamics as an adult while still feeling their emotional impact. The game becomes both a window into adolescent experience and a mirror reflecting how we still adjust our identities in different contexts as adults.

I do wonder, however, whether the game’s most thoughtful critiques will resonate with all players. There’s a genuine question about whether Inkle’s take on institutional power and identity might sail over the heads of some critics and players. When Verity discovers that becoming more morally flexible actually opens up more options, will players recognise this as a pointed criticism of how conformity limits us? Or will they simply see it as an interesting gameplay trick without absorbing the deeper commentary on how institutions enforce behavioural norms? The game’s packaging of complex ideas within accessible gameplay creates an interesting tension—can meaningful social critique succeed in a medium where many expect simpler stories?

The most impressive aspect of Inkle’s approach is their refusal to simplify complex human situations into basic moral choices or optimal strategies. While many narrative games ultimately guide players toward “best” outcomes—suggesting that with enough skill or knowledge, we can perfect any social situation—Expelled! stubbornly resists such simplification. There are no perfect solutions to Verity’s situation—only complicated, messy human responses that reveal as much about us as players as they do about the character we’re guiding.

When I finally left the school grounds—in my case, having crafted a clever alternative narrative that neither fully admitted guilt nor achieved complete exoneration—I kept turning over the game’s central question: How much of who we are is performance, and does a performance maintained long enough eventually become truth? Expelled! offers no easy answers, but through its intricate social puzzles and emotional depth, it provides something better: a mirror reflecting our own capacity for both self-deception and genuine transformation.

The game ultimately suggests that the stories we tell about ourselves—and that institutions tell about us—are neither completely true nor entirely false, but rather building blocks of a self that’s always evolving, always negotiated at the boundaries between personal agency and social pressure. By transforming this insight into an interactive experience with genuine depth, Inkle has created not just an entertaining narrative adventure but a thoughtful exploration of how identity forms, changes, and rebuilds itself within organisational frameworks. It deserves recognition not just as an excellent game but as a meaningful contribution to our understanding of how truth functions in social contexts—a rare example of interactive media that achieves genuine philosophical inquiry while remaining thoroughly engaging.

Games that stick with you long after you’ve stopped playing are increasingly uncommon in an industry often focused on flashy spectacle rather than lasting impact. Expelled! achieves this lingering presence not through technical wizardry or visual excess—though it excels in both areas—but through its honest examination of how we build ourselves through narrative. The game’s brilliance comes from refusing to separate gameplay mechanics from meaning; the act of navigating social perceptions becomes inseparable from exploring how identity forms.