1 vs. 100 Hours: Justifying Mystery Game Length

Why some mysteries overstay their welcome — and how others earn every minute.

Can you ever have too much of a mystery game?

This question has been on my mind for years, but especially the past few months.

In my analysis of 2024, it turned out that short games like Duck Detective, The Operator, and No Case Should Remain Unsolved (1 to 3 hours each) all ranked in the top ten highest reviewed mystery games released that year.

(This year’s sequel to Duck Detective, also short, once again did well.)

But with recent replayable hits like Blue Prince and The Hundred Line, it’s obvious that people are still sinking their time into mystery games that range from 50 to 100 hours of content or more.

What’s interesting to me is that both extremes are massively successful, so it’s immediately clear that length isn’t a real factor. A mystery game can be a hit whether it’s 100 hours or only 1 hour long.

The overwhelming majority of reviews for both games are positive. But among the small number of negative reviews, the length is almost always mentioned.

So, it does appear that length is technically a factor, but other aspects of each game’s design mitigate those problems to a point where it is no longer an issue.

In today’s article, I’m going to break down the techniques mystery games use to justify their length, and how developers can apply them to succeed at any scale.

Game length is not easily measured

Trying to define how “long” a game takes is already a difficult task.

Mystery novels, movies, and other media have pre-defined and standardized lengths. When you start one, you know roughly how long it will take you to finish it.

But mystery games are different: interactivity naturally means the game expands and contracts based on the player’s decisions and skills. Specifically in the mystery genre, reading speed and puzzle-solving ability are the two biggest determinations of length.

Some games are completely linear by design, while others are highly replayable. When we talk about length, do we include all endings, just the true ending, or the very first ending that the player decides to stop on?

A mystery visual novel with 6 routes that average 3 hours each would be a short game if we only measure one route, but a long game if we measure them all.

Other kinds of mystery games where you can replay it as much as you’d like (i.e. procedurally generated mysteries or multiplayer games) fall into a completely different category: the game ends up being as long as you want it to be.

Analogous to the previous example, one round might take an hour to finish, but you decide to play one round per day for 20 days. So is the game only 1 hour long, or is it 20 hours long?

We will set aside these concerns for now. You can choose to define them however you want, but let’s go ahead and define what I mean by “short” vs. “long”:

• A short game is under 5 hours.

• A long game is over 15 hours.

• Anything in between is medium length.

Take a look on YouTube at some playthroughs of your favorite mystery games, and you will get a general idea of where each game falls.

The truth is that there are highly successful games in all three categories. But the techniques each game needs to implement in order to become successful changes depending on which category they fall into.

(Side note: when I talk about success, that can mean achieving profitability, reaching a large audience, or just having a large percentage of positive reviews. Your choice!)

Why length feels like a problem

Time is our most precious resource, and we are understandably frustrated when we pay for something that wastes it.

When I was a teenager, I had all the free time in the world. I loved immersing myself in the lengthy stories of Umineko and Danganronpa. But now that I’m older and have more responsibilities, my time is limited, and I value games that can deliver a solid experience in just a few hours (like many of our Mystery Game Jam entries).

We must first differentiate between “content” and “padding.” Content is the actual gameplay, and so we enjoy games that have a lot of content. Padding artificially increases game length without adding any value. So when a long game consists mostly of padding — redundant cutscenes and slow animations — it becomes a chore.

In other words, a short game full of content beats a long game full of padding. But a long game full of content always beats a shorter game.

We also can’t ignore the financial aspect. Nobody wants to pay for a full pizza and only receive a slice. And conversely, nobody wants to pay for a generous amount of food that just doesn’t taste pleasant to eat.

In game design terms, we might call these “depth” and “pacing.”

• A short game needs depth. You aren’t in the game for a long time, but it ends up being a complete and satisfying experience. Like going to a party — you go and it’s quickly over, but at least you had a lot of fun.

• A long game needs pacing. Especially with our decreased attention spans, something needs to be happening or we quickly get bored of it. Like a cross-country trip: you’ll accept the long ride if the scenery keeps changing and you have fun on the way there, regardless of the destination.

One example of a long mystery game with great pacing is Methods: The Detective Competition. It’s a long game, but it’s broken down into bite-sized chapters that make it easy to feel like you are making substantial progress each time. It’s like the “just one more turn” feeling you get from a turn-based strategy game, but repurposed into “just one more chapter.”

More generally, if you can structure your long game as a sequence of short games, you can achieve strong pacing.

We often forget about the concept of a “game loop” when talking about linear mystery games, but it’s actually still there. The loop begins with a question and ends with an “aha!” moment. But that “aha!” moment also creates new questions from the information you just uncovered, which causes the loop to start over again.

When you structure your game so that the time between question and answer is minimal, the result is frequent bursts of dopamine that encourage the player to keep moving forward.

Justifying an extremely short game

Now that we’ve broken down long games into a series of short games, we need to understand what makes a short game feel justified on its own.