PLAY
Expelled!
HIT THE BOOKS As ever with Inkle, Expelled is a game in love with books. Not for nothing does its central crime take place in a library. And while the setup feels like Agatha Christie, and at least one character invokes modern crime novels such as Stuart Turton’s The Seven Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle, it’s hard not to see a different kind of classic glinting deep within the game. This is a web rather than a single scarlet thread, after all, and perhaps Expelled’s closest literary sibling is that inter-war charmer Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons’ novel in which a singular force moves through the lives of a selection of engaging clichés, upending their routines and leaving a frantic kind of order in its wake. What is education, after all, if not “expensive, athletic and prolonged”?
Developer/publisher Inkle Format iOS, PC (version tested), Switch Release Out now
It begins with a note of uncertainty, and things only grow more ambiguous as events unfold
The best way to describe Expelled, the latest narrative adventure from Inkle, is to say that it’s the kind of game in which a question about yarn can result in an answer about thermodynamics. One morning, Mrs Ire, the fierce and suitably angular geometry teacher at Miss Mulligatawny’s School For Promising Girls, is asked why she enjoys knitting. In response, she talks about entropy. In a universe that seems so eager to fall apart, perhaps knitting can in some way arrest its collapse, hold things together, and even redeem the situation a little? “To spite the devil’s own face,” Mrs Ire concludes with an unexpected flourish. “It is a holy task.”