Expelled!

Most detective games are lying to you. Not in the fun, diegetic way — in the structural way. The mystery is a corridor dressed up as a maze, and your “deductions” are keys the designer left on the floor. Expelled!, the latest from Cambridge-based inkle Ltd (the studio behind 80 Days and Overboard!), doesn’t play that game. It hands you a genuine social simulation and dares you to survive it.

The setup is delicious. It’s 1922 at Miss Mulligatawney’s School for Promising Girls, and you are Verity Amersham, a scholarship student — which, in the vicious class economics of an elite English boarding school, means suspect number one. A School Prefect has gone out of a window. You’ve been blamed. You have one school day to clear your name, and the game is refreshingly agnostic about how: find the real culprit, or frame some poor girl who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Morality is your problem, not the game’s.

Structurally, Expelled! inverts Overboard!‘s premise — there you were the murderer covering your tracks; here you’re the innocent scrambling to prove it — but the engine underneath has matured considerably. Every character in the school moves independently, sees things, hears things, and remembers all of it. That memory is the whole game.

Released March 12, 2025 on Steam (PC/Mac), Switch, and iOS for $5.99, it carries an 82 on Metacritic and a 4.0-out-of-5 store rating. For once, the consensus looks right.

• A Living Clockwork School: Roughly a dozen NPCs move through the school on their own schedules, witnessing events and forming opinions. Lie to one girl in the library and she may repeat it — mangled — to a teacher an hour later. The simulation, not a script, generates your consequences.
• 30–45 Minute Runs, Built for Replay: Each playthrough is a single school day. Early attempts are meant to end in failure, and that’s the design: knowledge carries forward in the player’s head, and the game keeps revealing new mysteries, endings, and opportunities across runs.
• Full Voice Acting Led by Amelia Tyler: The Baldur’s Gate 3 narrator anchors a cast that sells every arch put-down and panicked confession, over a period-perfect 1920s soundtrack featuring Gershwin, Armstrong, and Bessie Smith.

The Loop: Groundhog Day With a Motive

The core loop of Expelled! is closer to Outer Wilds than to Ace Attorney. Your real inventory isn’t objects — it’s knowledge. On a first run, the day ends in expulsion (or worse), and it feels like a loss. It isn’t. What’s been learned — that the matron leaves her office at ten, that two girls have a secret worth protecting, that a particular door is unlocked during chapel — becomes ammunition for the next attempt.

This is where the 30–45 minute run length reveals itself as the game’s most disciplined decision. A social simulation this reactive could easily sprawl into an unmanageable ten-hour slog where consequences arrive too late to trace back to causes. Instead, inkle compresses cause and effect into a window short enough that the ripples stay visible. When a scheme collapses, the culprit lie is identifiable — and the restart costs minutes, not hours. That’s the difference between frustration and obsession.

NPCs That Actually Remember

The headline system — characters who remember everything they see and hear — sounds like marketing copy until it turns on you. Steal something while a first-year is watching from a doorway, and she becomes a liability to manage: bribe her, discredit her, or hope she doesn’t get asked the right question at the wrong moment. Eavesdropping is a resource. Gossip is a currency. A rumor planted in the morning can come back around by afternoon wearing a completely different shape.

Crucially, the simulation is legible. Games like this usually fail in one of two directions: either the NPCs are so scripted that manipulation feels like lock-picking, or so opaque that outcomes feel random. Expelled! threads it. When a plan fails, the postmortem is almost always reconstructable — she saw it, she told the Prefect, the Prefect told Mulligatawney — and that legibility is what makes the framing route so wickedly satisfying. Building a false case against an innocent classmate requires the same evidentiary rigor as finding the truth. Arguably more.

Writing That Carries the Weight

Systems only matter if the words landing on them are good, and inkle’s prose remains the best in the business. The 1922 setting isn’t wallpaper; the class anxiety of being a scholarship girl among heiresses informs who trusts Verity, who condescends to her, and who assumes her guilt before breakfast. The game’s willingness to let the player be genuinely awful — a liar, a thief, a framer of innocents — gives its branching real moral texture rather than the usual paragon/renegade pantomime.

If there’s a structural weakness, it’s the far end of the replay curve. The first five or six runs are electric; by around run ten, the skeleton beneath the skin starts showing, and the shifting opportunities shift a little less. A few characters are also noticeably thinner than the leads — functional gears rather than people. Neither issue dents the core experience, but anyone expecting 80 Days’ near-bottomless variety should calibrate: this is a deep well, not an infinite one.

The art direction goes for stylized 2D illustration — bold, poster-like character work with a period palette that reads instantly on everything from a 6-inch phone screen to a monitor. It’s handsome and, more importantly, functional: characters are identifiable at a glance, which matters enormously in a game about tracking who saw what.

Technically, there’s little reason for concern. This is a text-and-illustration engine, not a renderer stress test — a 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, and the constant restart loop the design demands is exactly the kind of thing such an engine handles well. The audio production deserves specific praise: Amelia Tyler’s performance is the connective tissue of the whole experience, and the licensed jazz — actual Gershwin, actual Armstrong, actual Bessie Smith — does more world-building per bar than most games manage per hour.

• iOS: Arguably the definitive version. inkle’s interfaces have always been touch-first at heart, and the touch controls map naturally onto conversations and locations rather than feeling ported. The run length is ideal for mobile sessions. One real caveat for the ecosystem at large: there is no Android version, and inkle hasn’t announced one.
• Steam (PC/Mac): Mouse input suits the interface comfortably, and the larger screen gives the illustration work room to breathe. For players who like keeping notes — and with this game, they should — playing next to an actual notepad or a second monitor is a genuine advantage.
• Nintendo Switch: A natural fit for the pick-up-and-play structure. Handheld mode is the closest match to the iOS experience; docked play works, with button navigation adding a hair of friction versus touch — nothing that matters in a game with zero execution demands.

Expelled! is inkle operating with real confidence: a studio that has spent a decade building narrative technology finally pointing all of it at a single, well-sized problem. The social simulation is smart enough to surprise and honest enough to let players understand why. The writing is sharp, the performances are excellent, and the structure respects your time in a way this medium almost never does. It won’t last forever — the well has a bottom — but the hours spent at Miss Mulligatawney’s are dense with scheming, and few games this year can say the same. This is the detective genre done properly: not a corridor pretending to be a maze, but a maze that plays fair — with reservations about its shelf life rather than its quality. We rate it a clear recommendation.