Expelled!

This review is specially made for those who like to get all the achievements in games. Minor spoilers ahead. Expelled! is sort of a visual novel detective game where your choices play a huge part in the story and everything you do and don’t do will come back to bite you later on. It uses the same presentation and visual style as Overboard! but adds a morality system that unlocks new dialogue options and actions as you get increasingly more naughty. The story overall is well written and engaging and with each playthrough you’ll keep discovering new secrets and information about the characters that can be used later as leverage, specially at the end of the afternoon when your “judgement” takes place. I don’t want to spoil too much but something interesting happens to the story as you get truly evil. The visual style is different from Overboard! but has a similar cartoonish look, but with a ticker dark outline instead of the bright highlights. The background where the locations are picked is more detailed but also the several different places inside the school where you can go to. The sound is minimal, with no narration or voice acting, just a few words and sound effects and s…

Compelling, fun and a bit infuriating! Really enjoyed the characters, simple art style and how the story becomes more layered and complex with each play through

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 cha…

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.

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 s…

Fun, funny, great mystery game with surprising replayability value