Expelled!

A well-written story and a great underlying system for driving things forward and tracking player choice in Ink make this game fun enough that it compelled me to get all the achievements. It's a nice little puzzle box to unravel, although I didn't have the patience to 100% it without a walkthrough for the last few ones I was missing. And I know there's probably more information I could have unearthed, but I really enjoyed the time I spent with it.

Good game. I love being bad. :)

Has a lot of potential and improved significantly on *Overboard!*, but I don't think they're quite there yet. Shows a lot of promise initially, and even towards the end while earning all the achievements I felt the initial 7:30am to 9:00am stretch was well executed. There's so much evidence to hide and not enough time to do it all, so every attempt feels like a desperate scramble to stuff everything away before anyone can ask too many questions. After that, though... Time means nothing, everyone's schedules are extremely rigid, nobody has much worth discussing after the first time you've spoken to them, and there are hardly any time-sensitive objectives you need to navigate. I'd love to see a more ambitious take on this premise, with characters moving between locations more purposefully, requiring you to have a good understanding of everyone's locations to move evidence back and forth or eavesdrop on secret meetings. Inkle has this distinct jank across their games that's really hard to conceptualize as some sort of unifying game design philosophy and it can get egregious here. For whatever reason you're only presented with three options at any given time. The skip function for some reason only recognizes the last option you took rather than all options taken across your full save. Characters will casually talk about Louisa falling out of the window in their dialogue but the game only seems to flip the "knows about Louisa falling out the window" variable when you explicitly warn them that Louisa has fallen out the window. Still, I did like it overall. I hope if they make another game in this series it can build upon *Expelled!* the way *Expelled!* did *Overboard!*

Much bigger than Overboard!, a bit more convoluted and not always in a good way

1) Not much of a mystery 2) The writers clearly have an axe to grind 3) Celebrates evil Regret my purchase.

I liked Overboard better. This one gets too complicated with too many open ends. You don't know when and where to try new things to make the game progress. I checked a guide after getting completely frustrated and it seems i was just 1 or 2 things away from the ending, but there are so many variables... and also weird bugs where the game doesn't keep track correctly of what character is where in this run, so you can't never be sure the game isn't just getting dead-ended. Some interesting scenes I would like to replicate happened because of random variables without a clear feedback of how to trigger them again. It has a lot of sequences that you just have to trigger in the right order and they are not short, so after the tenth playthrough of the same "cleaning the evidence" it gets too repetitive. TL;DR: just play Overboard! It's better in many regards.

The game is amazing, way more interesting than the previous one, even if it was very good too. The meta is mazing. Don't want to spoil but the more you play the more you see connection and things move. Amazing idea !

The game is very replayable. The story is a murder mystery that still had me guessing after ten play throughs. A run of the story isn't too terribly long, so the ground hog day-esce format isn't tiring. The art style is charming and the ways you can progress the story are clever. I believe you'll get the most enjoyment out of the game by going in blind story-wise.

Evaluation: Interesting dialogue tree game where you uncover more about the story each run. Experience: The game moves forward through dialogue choices, with each choice passing a certain amount of time. Various events happen at given times and it ultimately puts you on a clock to solve the mystery as the end of the day approaches. The characters are interesting, and there are several endings with some ambiguity about which one is the 'true' ending. The better/possibly canon endings will likely require many runs in order to achieve, as many choices and secrets are not available until certain conditions are met. The story falls under 'dramedy' as a serious underlying story that often plays for comedic effect. Suggestions: The game is driven by the story, and while the player makes choices, there's not much gameplay beyond that. The repetitive nature of the game means that you will likely replay certain scenes several times to uncover new branches and reveal the secrets of the school, of Verity, and of her classmates. If that sounds interesting, then I recommend checking the game out. The game is generally appropriate for all ages, though note that some choices involve the main character acting violently towards others, and this is largely played for comedy. Additionally, some of the adults act borderline abusive towards some of the children, and this is not directly addressed by the characters in the story, likely because it might not have been that out of the ordinary for the time period that the game is set.

I really liked it, even more than the last one. The characters, setting, music and story really came together nicely. 10/10 Girls Expelled