I’m a huge fan of the storytelling games made by Inkle and what’s more this is a prequel to Overboard! so I just had to get it. I wasn’t too fond of the earlier game as I found it too short but I did like the story and the characters. This game too has rather little content but the effective playing time is lengthened by it being significantly more difficult. It’s difficult enough that I would consider it a puzzle game rather than just a storytelling game.

You’re Verity Amersham, a student in an all girls’ boarding school in 1922. You begin the morning in the library where the school’s star hockey player Louisa Hardcastle smashes the historical stained glass window and falls through it to the bushes below. She uses your hockey stick to do so and without intervention, you will be blamed for it and expelled from school. In fact, you’re likely to be sent home by the headmistress Miss Mulligateway before the end of morning assembly. Fortunately you get to redo the day as many times as you want, gathering all the secrets of the school and the people in it. With that knowledge you can formulate a plan to not only stay in school but turn the tables on the conspirator against you and eventually be named as Head Girl.

There are only a handful of locations and characters so you might think that it’s easy to iteratively brute force every choice to get the outcome you want. But because of the schedule the characters keep to, there is often only a very narrow window of opportunity to do the things that you want and there is an evil meter that limits your available actions. Verity starts out as a good, rule-abiding girl but you won’t get anywhere without getting mean. The game is also dishonest in that you the player are kept from knowing what Verity knows at the beginning. She is apparently such a compulsive liar that she lies even to herself. She is indeed a very nasty and manipulative girl. One key spoiler that I will reveal is that Verity is the same character as the one you control in Overboard!

I expected this to be as easy as the previous game and so was surprised to discover that to do well, you do actually need to pay careful attention to everyone’s schedules throughout the day. Your main job at first is just to gather secrets and then discover the method to transfer your knowledge in between runs. Once you do know everything, the number of actions needed to get a favorable outcome is surprisingly low. In fact, everything important happens in the morning and you can basically just skip the rest of the day. I had an enjoyable time puzzling it out and I have to admit that I wouldn’t have been able to get the extra special ending without looking it up online.

The writing is as good as always, the story is shockingly evil and the added difficulty makes it a decent puzzle game. Even so it is small in scale and I was annoyed that the narrative actively lies to the player by misrepresenting Verity’s actions. I do like Inkle’s style but I wish they’d raise their ambitions a bit and made their games larger.