Humor me for a moment while I tell you my most embarrassing childhood story. Back in the AOL Instant Messenger days, my friends and I loved trolling people. We were young and got a kick out of saying totally absurd stuff to people from another town over that we only tangential knew. It was all good fun until someone was smart enough to turn the tables. A person I was poking fun at told me that they’d reported me to the police for harassment, and I was gullible enough to believe them. I started trying to backtrack in the most obvious ways possible, claiming that my account was hacked. The more I lied, the more it ballooned. Long story short, it all ended in my father going to the local police station to talk to them about a report that was never actually filed. As you can probably guess, the whole thing ended with a solid grounding.
The moral of the story? Kids are terrible liars, and that’s what Expelled! is all about.
The latest game from Inkle, the prolific studio behind A Highland Song, is a continuation of 2021’s Overboard! That game was an inventive narrative roguelike that had players trying to get away with murder while on a cruise. It was a genius game about how tricky it can be to lie your way out of something that leaves so many loose threads. Expelled! continues that thesis, but throws both kids and Christian guilt into the mix. The result is a hilarious comedy of errors that will make you feel like an idiotic teen again.
Expelled! begins with a shocking crime. A student at a Christian girl’s school plummets through a stained glass window and is sent into the rose bushes below. The crime isn’t so much murder; she survives the fall. The faculty seems more upset that a window made by God himself has been broken. Oh, but pushing the school’s star student out a window is bad too, I suppose. Who’s to blame? All signs point to Verity, a student whose hockey stick happens to have been used to smash the window. That’s enough evidence to sentence her to a fate worse than death: expulsion.
My job is to get Verity off the hook for a crime that she didn’t commit. Or maybe she did. Who’s to say? What makes Expelled! such a brilliant follow-up to Overboard! is that it doubles down on its unreliable narrator. I’m hearing the story through the eyes of a kid who is desperate to get out of trouble, so it’s hard to trust any detail I get. Verity has the tendency to lie herself into corners which often lead to dead ends. It brings me right back to that fateful day where AIM landed me in hot water.
I can change her fate in a sort of roguelike hook where I go through the day of the crime and try to get out of trouble as best I can. Can I hide the hockey stick? Can I get an alibi? If all else fails, can I frame someone else? Expelled! gives players tons of options to explore as a clock counts down the hours until the day ends. I’ve done several runs now and each has gone in a completely different direction based on which dialogue options I’ve chosen. Some have ended immediately as I got caught at the scene of the crime. Others had me deftly making it through the entire day without getting expelled, only to discover that there’s more to the story than meets the eye. There are layers of mystery here that are naturally uncovered with each attempt to save Verity’s hide.
As an added twist on the excellent Overboard! formula, the Christian school setting plays into gameplay too. I’m not just proving my innocence, but also remaining innocent. A meter at the top of the screen shows me what a good Christian girl I am, and it ticks up the more I lie, insult teachers, or just respond like a snarky teen. There’s a tangible pressure that makes me feel like a stressed out Christian trying to play by the rules, even when those rules make me a total pushover. Whether or not Verity abides by word of God — or the school’s headmistress, really — is up to you.
That thread turns Expelled! into a unique coming of age story. It’s about a character trying to separate her personal identity from one that has been imposed upon her by authority and religion. Does Verity actually want to be the goodie two shoes who never talks back? Or does she want to be someone who isn’t afraid to stand up for herself? The central mystery of it all is a great hook that kept me playing, but that’s the journey I really found myself connecting to the longer I played.
There’s one more childhood anecdote that comes back to me when I think about Expelled! When I was a kid, I was forced to attend a CCD class after school once a week at my teacher’s house. One day, I spotted a bag of Goldfish crackers lying around and ate a few. Class was long and I was hungry, sue me. I was caught and reprimanded for it, forced to write an essay about how stealing is wrong. It wound up being a formative moment. Isn’t this supposed to be the religion of sharing and feeding the hungry? It’s one of the first times I remember breaking free from my Catholic upbringing and strengthening my own beliefs. I felt more like myself because of it, and I hope I’m giving Verity the same freedom every time I tell the headmistress to piss off.
Expelled! is available now on PC, Nintendo Switch, and iOS.
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