This article was originally published on March 28, 2025 - read the full issue

By Marie Dealessandri

I thought I had done everything right this time – I hid the hockey stick, I escaped the library, I didn't speak out of turn to anyone, I went to every class as if nothing had happened, and even practised my latin diligently. Sure, I did make a few questionable decisions along the way, but who could blame me? I was being framed.

I made it to the end of the day and went to bed, thinking I’d finally unlocked a good ending… only to be cornered by classmates in dolphin masks forcing me to dig my own grave and lie in it? I suppose I didn't technically get expelled, but I wouldn't call this a win. And yet, I went straight back to the start of my groundhog day, determined to get to the bottom of it all.

That pretty much sums up the frenetic joy of playing Expelled, the latest game from Heaven's Vault developer Inkle. This delightfully written whodunit, easy to pick up and immensely replayable, is an evolution of the concept Inkle explored in 2021's detective adventure Overboard. It’s a great example of a developer building on proven foundations.

"When we built Overboard, we came away with the sense that we had this code base that could do multiple characters moving around with independent thoughts and who were kind of manipulable," Inkle co-founder Jon Ingold explains. "And we thought, well, this is clearly a model for a hundred games – this isn't just one game. If we've got this technology, we ought to use it again."

For Expelled, Inkle wanted even more people, more movement, more interconnectivity between the characters.

"One of the things we wanted to do is push the limits of what's possible in that kind of reactive independent character space," Ingold says, "where you have a simulated story world generating an author content story, rather than just a physics engine doing physics with no narrative."

A key aspect of the Overboard concept being applied to another title was realising that the setting was not closely tied to its dynamics.

"The mechanics were characters walking around with memories and beliefs, on schedules that you can manipulate," Ingold says. "That's a very high-level abstract description of a game mechanic, whereas the skin was: you're on a boat, you're a murderer, Agatha Christie, [and so on]."

That meant the mechanic could be applied to a wealth of different settings "without any real difficulty," Ingold continues. "At the back of my head, I'm kind of aware that if we can get good at making these games, and if people like them, then we can make games of that kind [about] anything."

Alive in a way that most indie studios simply aren't

Inkle is undoubtedly good at making these games, with Expelled releasing this month to critical acclaim. But building on Overboard's foundations was also a way for Inkle to challenge current market woes.

"A Highland Song was a big project. It was bigger than we meant it to be, really," Ingold says of Inkle's previous release in 2023. "Whereas right now we're not really looking at doing another big-scale project because the market feels like a very dangerous place for everybody. So these short, repeatable things that you can understand quite quickly from the outset, as a developer, it's a nice place to be."

We conjure Bithell Shorts as an interesting comparison – short, narrative-driven titles developed by Bithell Games, meant to release at shorter intervals than traditional games.

"What I quite often come back to is Reigns, the Nerial titles," Ingold counters, "because for a little while there they were doing really well with Reigns [spinoffs]. It's one mechanic you can apply in lots of different places, and I think that's very comparable."

Expelled was also a way for Inkle to explore what it could do with its very small in-house team, comprising Ingold as narrative director, Joseph Humfrey as art and code director, and Anastasia Wyatt as 2D artist, with background artist and animator Ben Chandler joining in as a contractor.

"We’ve been a small studio that uses contractors to cover work that needs to be done for quite a long time," Ingold says, adding that remaining nimble is a key to surviving in the industry right now.

"Inkle is very small and entirely self-funded. The scale of a project that we make tends to be proportional to how well the last one did. Right now, that means that we’re alive in a way that most indie studios simply aren't, because we don't need to get funding from anybody. We're not subject to publisher whims. We can't be shut down. And because there's only a small number of us, our monthly turnover cost is fairly small. So we can survive indefinitely for the moment.

"I see indie studios crewing up to 12 or 20 people as soon as they start a project and that, to me, seems extraordinary. I don't know how on earth they fund projects like that. As far as I can see, if you can't do it with three or four people, you really shouldn't be doing it right now. It really does feel that risky.

"On the other hand, it's a bit of a tragedy because, as a studio that's actually making projects, I want to be able to give jobs to the very talented people in the industry. This very small kind of in-house operation is good for surviving, but it doesn't feel like we're doing much good in the world, and I kind of regret that."

Reading the market

One of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of Inkle and other indies is the impact of algorithm-led platforms.

"We're all out there trying to read the market like fortune tellers, looking at tea leaves to try and work out what the bloody hell is going to happen," Ingold says. "My interpretation of it is that, ten years ago, when indies were very successful, there was a real diversity of conversation about games. There were standout titles, but there was a lot of interest in what was new and what was coming up. And there was a real sense that you could have quite a diverse palate as a gamer. And, as the media has been [diminished], that's ended. That's all gone over to Twitch, which is a very metrics-driven platform – you end up with just a couple of algorithms driving all of the choices of what gets covered and displayed.

"Steam has its pick of the month, which it puts at the top and sells to a billion people, and then perhaps pats itself on the back and says, 'Didn't we predict the market very well!', without noticing that they made the market. And then presumably the Twitch algorithm is doing the same thing. And between them, you get the sense that maybe there's one or two games every month… They're not bad games, it's just that there's only one or two of them, whereas there used to be 20 or 30.

"And that polarisation of the market is done ultimately by a machine, so we can't predict it. As developers, we might look at Balatro and say, 'Card games are in now – let's all make card games,' but that's not actually the takeaway from Balatro. It's not that the market suddenly loves card games and wants to play ten of them – the market now has one card game and probably doesn't want to play any more of them."

If you want to be the next winner, you have to make something different, he posits. But knowing what to make exactly is impossible to predict.

"We're now in a position where we've bottlenecked all of our recommendations through this tiny corridor, provided by Steam and presumably by Twitch. And you cannot play that game and win. So we're not going to try. We don't bother with Next Fest, with demos, with trying to make something that's Steam-friendly or kind of suits the market. We just make things that suit our audience, that don't look like things that anyone else is making." He laughs: "And that's all we've got."

Looking ahead, Ingold hopes for the industry to turn to telling stories that are more human, more characterful.

"I want stories that make us sort of think and reflect more," he concludes. "I don't want to prompt you into a story. I want to actually tell you. But we can't do that if we don't have people. Stories are not about plot, they're not about world-building, and they're not about lore. They're about people."

This article was originally published on March 28, 2025 - read the full issue