In Overboard! we played as an actress who pushed her husband overboard, and we were asked to do everything we could to avoid suspicion: cover our tracks and frame someone else. It’s like an Agatha Christie novel in reverse, where we know the murderer from the first minutes. In Expelled! everything is different – the crime is also committed at the very beginning (a girl named Louise fell out of a window), but why it happened and who is guilty is a mystery. And the main suspect is Verity, who is kicked out of a prestigious girls’ school for what happened.
The heroine retells the situation to her father, with whom they sit in a neighboring pub, and at first everything really points to the fact that Verity is to blame. When the accident happened, she was in the same room, and next to the broken window lay her hockey stick – in this school the girls are actively involved in sports, and Louise is the brightest star of the hockey team. The girl was not killed, but the school authorities seem to be more concerned not with the fate of the student, but with the fact that an ancient stained glass window, which is considered almost sacred, was broken. And we know we didn’t do anything. Except there are no witnesses, and the motive isn’t exactly clear.
We need to prove our innocence. Expelled!, like Overboard!, offers to relive the same day over and over again – in the early morning we find ourselves in the unfortunate room, we see Louise’s inadequate actions and we have to do something. Our steps determine how early or late the day ends – if you want to, you can turn yourself in to the management straight away, after which a letter is sent to Verity’s parents informing them of her expulsion from the school. Or you’ll accidentally catch someone’s eye – the characters are walking around the building and, for example, will go into that room and see you with a club in your hands, after which it will be hard to turn away. If you throw the club out of the window, it will land on Louise’s head and she will lose consciousness. Is that something to avoid? You won’t know until you try.
That’s the beauty of the game – there’s a huge number of options, although it doesn’t seem that way at first. The building seems to be small: a geometry class, a library, a chapel, a medical center, a playground in the yard – there are about ten locations in total. But in each location there is something to do: either to study a table, or to open a locker, or to try to open a closed door – there is some way to open it, isn’t there? The students live by a schedule. You can go to study, or you can do something else – whatever you choose, you will encounter different characters and in one or another conditions will be able to get valuable information.
Some characters have such a strong accent that even reading the text can be difficult.
Experiments lead to the fact that with each new attempt you learn a mountain of details about this small universe. There are unpleasant characters, in dialogs with whom you try to be a pie-girl or a boor. There are sympathetic but strange characters, whether it’s a student from Russia, whose lines are overflowing with literary drama, or a girl who is constantly stuck in the medical center and has a supernatural ability. If the office is empty, you can explore it and find dirt or an item that you can put in your inventory and then use somewhere else. And if someone is sitting there, you will talk, choosing a different line each time.
You have to do everything yourself
Expelled! doesn’t tell you directly what is required of you, but gives you hints. For example, it suggests you try to set someone up or find some information – you just know that it’s possible, but you guess the way to solve the problems yourself. Subsequently, a whole puzzle is formed from all these pieces – if you know where you get this or that item, which suddenly becomes necessary, in the next pass you immediately start hunting for it. As in Overboard!, every action takes time – both to move from one location to another, and to say every single line. So if you decide to talk to someone for a long time, it won’t be a very fruitful day, but maybe you’ll get some valuable information at the end of the conversation and it will come in handy later on.
The most interesting feature of the game is related to the lines, next to which there is a devil icon. The thing is that in Expelled! they added something like a rebellion scale – a girl who seems nice and kind at first can start throwing insults or even mutilate other students. There aren’t many options at first, but with each playthrough there are more and more opportunities to fill the scale and unlock new choices – progress carries over from one attempt to the next, and with that comes an increase in disobedience. It’s refreshing to see some scenes – when calling the principal an old bag or generally pushing someone down the stairs because they were in the way, it’s firstly fun, and secondly, it allows you to add to your knowledge bank.
The only pity is that this knowledge is not recorded anywhere. The details are constantly being revealed – the background of the school, the skeletons in the girls’ closets, and the information that the management is hiding from them. When the heroine learns something important, a corresponding inscription pops up at the top of the screen, and you realize with your mind that in time this knowledge will be useful somewhere – for example, discuss it with someone else. But there are a lot of such pop-up tips, you can’t remember them all, so at some point you start writing it all down in a notebook. This seems to be the way it’s designed – I had the same complaint in Overboard!
This is probably the only noticeable downside of Expelled! – Otherwise, the game turned out to be truly marvelous. And in some respects even instructive – if you keep on being nice to everyone in an extreme situation, no one will even want to talk to you, they’ll just throw you out and forget about you. They will also say nasty things about you, since you are from a poor family and study in such an elite school – at least that’s how it is positioned by the management. The rebellion scale not only makes repeated passes diverse, but also much better reveals this mini-universe – many people have secrets and reasons to behave in one way or another, and simple methods to clear people out. And unraveling this tangle gets more and more interesting each time.
