Expelled!launched at a very different moment in time than its predecessor. Inkle’s previousgame, Overboard!, which starred a woman who murdered her husband during a cruise and tasked the player with getting away with it, launched in June 2021. Its Covid-era launch, a time when many players had been stuck inside with their families for a year, made the game resonate in darkly humorous ways.
“Because it was a game about killing your husband, I think, over lockdown… there was a slight fantasy of murdering your whole family that people could really connect with,” says Inkle co-founder and narrative director Jon Ingold. “Which is a horrible fantasy, but it’s a fantasy nonetheless.”
From The Sea To The School
Though four years later, we’ve exited the confines of quarantine, Inkle returned earlier this year with another mystery set in a confined space. Expelled!, the studio’s latest adventure game, tells the story of Verity Amersham, a working class scholarship recipient at a posh British boarding school.
As the game begins, another student throws herself out a historic stained glass window, using Verity’s hockey stick to break the priceless glass. Though the girl survives, Verity has now been framed for attempted murder and must figure out why the girl did it and how to prove her innocence. The catch? She only has eight hours before she’s -drum roll please -expelled!
As you play you relive those same eight hours over and over again, uncovering new nooks and crannies of the story and the school it’s set in. I asked Ingold about the difficulties of designing a game where repetition is core to the experience.
“All games are built on repetition,” he points out. “When you play Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, every time you take over one of those towers, it’s always the same gameplay. And there might be tweaks and quirks and you might have different power-ups, but the fundamental repetition is where the mastery comes from, it’s where the familiarity comes from, it’s an inherent part of gameplay.”
Hearing The Story Again
That familiarity, he acknowledges, does seem to chafe more in story-focused games like Expelled!, where the repetitive action in question is clicking on text, not enemy heads. Both Overboard! and Expelled! include the option to fast-forward through content you’ve already played, but Ingold says it’s less useful this time around because your options can change radically depending on small choices, items you’ve picked up, and which characters you’ve talked to at what times. “What we tried to do was just ensure that there were always significant new things for the player to be doing quickly, early, and to try and make them appealing,” he says.
So, for example, in a recent playthrough. I decided to look under Verity’s roommate’s bed and discovered a plush pair of slippers. When Verity picked them up, she discovered a big diamond inside. This is the first time this has happened, and I’ve played through versions of this scene on a dozen-plus occasions. In dialogue, new choices often present themselves when you don’t expect them, and you can’t quite figure out what prompted the change. Ingold says the game is a bit mysterious on purpose.
“If you look at all of the games we’ve made, really, they’re very difficult to min-max. They’re deliberately difficult… because we hide all the statistics we can,” Ingold says. “We make it very opaque how you trigger anything. I guess, if anything, it’s a statement of principle. We want you to relax, trust us, and we’ll tell you a story… That’s quite different than a lot of narrative games, and that’s okay.”
It’s an approach, I tell him, that makes me glad I wasn’t writing guides on the game.
Making Your Own Expelled!
Though Ingold wants the game to be difficult to pin down, he wants games like it to be easy to make. To that end, Inkle offers multiple tools (ink, inky, and inklewriter) so that developers can craft their own text-based games with a straightforward text-driven system. I asked Ingold if he had any advice for anyone starting out with the studio’s tools. It turned out to be good advice for playing Expelled!, too.
“Embrace not having a flowchart. People worry about that sometimes, but you don’t need a map of the story in your head. You don’t need to be able to see the map of your story for it to be a good interactive story,” he says. “When a game reaches the point where you may’t hold a map of it in your head, because it’s too complicated, that’s when you’ve got something good that’s worth playing… Let go of the flowchart and embrace the chaos.”
As long as that chaos doesn’t lead you to, you know, murder any husbands.
