As you may have noticed with Spiderweb games is that those games aren’t as unique as they seem. You expect ugly 2D RPG to have tons of text and hardcore gameplay but it’s really more like your usual approachable RPG but made on a budget. And with higher expressive freedom instead of a storyline approved by a committee. Geneforge 5 might be one of the best RPGs I’ve played, if I had to compare it to anything it would be Fallout New Vegas. But it’s fantasy world which dares to not include elves and dwarves and the dragons are not really dragons. The story feels more like a good sci-fi which poses problems based on a fantastic premise and a consistent inner logic. They’re definitely not short though.

And I’ve not played Risen. Maybe I should fix that too.

But yes, I start to feel a bit fatigued by the twenty hour mark so it’s baffling to me that so many new titles are quoting longer and longer playtimes like it’s something to be proud of. The best games I’ve played this year have all clocked in at under 12 hours, and it’s worth remembering that many of the classic Bioware RPGs released between 2004 and 2010 were only 15-ish hours long — strangely enough, the less game you have the more resources you can spend on polishing what’s there.

Unfortunately I think this is just the new order of things; modern development costs are ballooning while RRPs have remained more or less static, and so games need to hook people in for increasingly absurd amounts of time so that they’ll spend additional money on microtransactions and DLC. Never mind the fact that if you actually set the scope of your game to something sensible you wouldn’t need to spend nearly quite so much money in the first place.

I’d want more people to try to be like Spiderweb games, not Spider games. Those games have problems, but it’s not because of being overly ambitious, they use whatever they have well. It’s better to have ugly serviceable 2D than ugly choppy demanding disorienting 3D if you’re low on resources. But sadly even AAA games suffer from ambition, like Andromeda seemingly hoping to also be a Destiny-like infinite threadmill of upgrades, multiplayer and singleplayer integration and BioWare trademark detailed characters in a huge detailed open world. Dragon Age Inquisition had similar fantasies about next gen gameplay which people didn’t like, and then they released expansion consisting of traditional linear dungeons which everybody liked, you’d think they’d learn something from it.

Your review sounds exactly like it’s a game that was padded to be a 60 hour adventure, because apparently an RPG can’t be epic unless it’s as long as Game of Thrones TV show. I struggle to name an RPG that aimed at such playtime and didn’t outstay its welcome; Divinity Original Sin 2 I guess. Even Obsidian have realized it’s a bad practice and their isometric revival games are all short but wide. Reportedly Spider previous games (like Bound by Flame) are 12h adventures so their junkiness might work much better. Now that I’ve tasted A Short Hike (and previously intense short sesstion microstrategy games like Into the Breach or Slay the Spire) I can no longer looks at all those bloated padded monstrocities.