Expelled! review – turning the tables on the private school class hierarchy
As with seemingly everything in the UK, it all comes back to the class system. Verity Amersham, a scholarship student at Miss Mulligatawney’s School for Promising Girls, is accused of pushing the hockey captain out of a window, and the school’s fearsome headmistress is determined to expel her despite the flimsiest evidence. When Verity protests her innocence, Miss Mulligatawney remains unpersuaded, spelling out her reasoning in plain terms: as a northerner with working-class parents, Verity simply isn’t the “right sort”.
The injustice of it all is a potent driver, ensuring I set about my goal of preventing Verity’s expulsion with determined zeal, much like Matilda defying the hateful Miss Trunchbull. As in developer Inkle’s 2021 game Overboard!, you’re given a time limit to work within and a handful of areas to move between, from the library to the sick room (AKA the “san”, where the school’s grumpy matron lurks). Each area has characters to talk to and objects to find, and each action moves the clock forward. The game follows a rigid school timetable: at 2pm, for example, all of the students will troop up to the library for Latin.
The idea is to work out who will be where and when, and plan your exploration accordingly. You might, say, want to sneak into the san while matron is teaching gym in the grounds, so you can poke around in her locked medicine cabinet. The secrets you uncover will unlock new lines of conversation, which in turn unlock further secrets and more avenues of exploration, all with the eventual aim of preventing Verity’s unjust expulsion.
You won’t be able to achieve that on your first try, though. This game is designed to be played multiple times, each half-hour run improving your understanding of characters’ motivations and what exactly has been going on at this strange school. I won’t spoil it here, but the plot goes to some delightfully unexpected places, and the 1922 setting offers an excuse to riff on the effects of empire, the first world war, and of course the class system. And that system really is rigged against Verity, who quickly discovers that the only way to fight back is to get nasty.
Cheeky or venomous retorts will unlock further dialogue, and if you want to help Verity not only to avoid expulsion but also to succeed at becoming head girl, you will see her stoop to lying, stealing and blackmail. We also get the sense that Verity might be a somewhat unreliable narrator; the story subtly changes in each telling, as she relates it to her father.
This helps to shake things up a little, but inevitably the structure of the game results in some repetition as you perform many of the same actions each day. It requires a little patience, then, as well as some mental agility, to hold all of the avenues of investigation in your head: some kind of in-game notebook to keep track of it all would have been welcome. But it’s worth persevering to uncover all of the school’s intimate secrets, as well as to enjoy more of narrative director Jon Ingold’s excellent writing.
It will only take a couple of evenings to reach the game’s corker of an ending, and Verity’s arc is supremely satisfying, as she goes from put-upon victim to master manipulator. Here, the public-school system serves mainly as a way to ingrain inequality, normalise bullying and encourage ruthlessness, and the only way to succeed is to beat the bastards at their own game. When the system is so rotten, what choice do you have?
