How long should you play a game before you truly understand it?
There’s a certain contingent of PC gamers who believe you need to spend hundreds of hours with a title before you’re allowed to form an opinion. Especially in online spaces, it’s common to see someone discredited for “only” playing 10 hours—as if they just sniffed the box and walked away.
I get it… kind of. If we’re talking about something massive and layered like Skyrim, then sure. One playthrough can take weeks out of your life. But is that the standard?
Take a glance at GOG, which often lists average completion times. Here’s a small sample:
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance - 41.5 hours
- Deus Ex - 22.5 hours
- Frostpunk - 10.5 hours
- The Invincible - 6.5 hours
- Project Warlock - 4 hours
That’s a huge range. Why?
Mostly genre. The more RPG-like a game is, the longer it will take to finish. But the more arcade-y a game is, the tighter the runtime.
But there’s this myth—especially among purists—that a “real” PC game shouldn’t feel arcade-y. That PC games are meant to be vast, deep, and long.
I’ve been a PC gamer for decades. That idea’s nonsense.
When I had a physical Commodore 64, I could beat Uridium in under 20 minutes. Sure, the C64 is technically an 8-bit micro—not a “PC” in the strictest sense—but I also played Dangerous Dave on DOS. That took about 30 minutes.
What about much more modern games? A few months ago, I played Virginia (2016). I was done in one sitting. It took me an hour and a half.
Which brings us back to the real question: what does it mean to “understand” a game? Is it the same as completing it?
I don’t think so. Plenty of games aren’t even meant to be completed. Take puzzle games. Tetris, for instance, never ends—just speeds up until you die. That’s still a PC game, by the way. It launched on DOS before it ever hit arcades or home consoles.
And even for games that do have an ending, completion doesn’t necessarily equal comprehension. What’s the point of dragging yourself through 30 hours of crap just to say you finished it? I've done that with bad games—and trust me, the only thing I gained was regret. Pongo, for example. I played that mess to the bitter end. I don’t understand it any better than I did five minutes in. I just feel cheated out of my time.
Most games tell you what they’re about in the first five minutes. If it’s unresponsive, broken, or filled with jank right out of the gate, that’s usually your cue to uninstall. And I’m not just talking about asset flips.
Elder Scrolls: Arena stinks. It’s got one of the worst control schemes I’ve ever witnessed. And even by the standards of 1995, it is an ugly game. No, I haven’t finished Arena, nor do I intend to—I have suffered enough. I gave it a solid 30 minutes—everyone told me it was a great—but some games are not worth it.
Granted, sometimes there are games that massively improve after the first five minutes. Star Wars Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith is a good example of this. Initially, trying to figure out what to do is such a chore. But afterwards, it’s pure bliss. And for this reason, I feel most negative reviews on Steam are wrong.
But Mysteries of the Sith is an exception—not the rule. Most of the time, if you like a game within five minutes of play, you’ll probably like it 50 hours afterwards.
If it’s bad at the start, it rarely gets better. So no—hundreds of hours aren’t necessary to “get” a game. You don’t owe your time to any title. Five minutes can be enough. And if that five minutes fills you with joy, then the game has already done its job.
After all, isn’t the point to have fun?
Sometimes you can spot a critical design decision that experience with the genre can tell you right off the bat it won't be for you.
Sometimes you have to play through it to realize it doesn't meet expectations. A lot of the games I play are deep sandboxes that if I like I'll sink hundreds of hours into, and often come with a very steep learning period. With those the problems can be subtle and take a depth of experience to understand. I have 108 hours in Civ 5 because that's how long it took me to realize I didn't like it at all, despite previously being a fan of the series. There are other games I've played for longer and wouldn't recommend if asked because having developed a nuanced understanding of the systems I see how some design decisions undermine the fantasy the game is trying to sell. Sure I enjoyed it well enough at the time, but for someone who likes to engage with depth this sort of perspective can be appreciated in a review so you know the time is better spent elsewhere.
That's funny because Civ 5 is my absolute favourite in the series. I can play that game forever.
To me, Civ 6 is the one I felt profound disappointment. By no means is it awful. I just feel it didn't reach the height of Civ 5.
But of course, everyone experiences fun differently.
No shade to Civ 5, it was just a case of I realized my tastes had changed. It took me a few games to be really playing it for that to be able to sink in.
It's perhaps not the best example of the broader point, but I would have to write a literal essay to say why I'm lukewarm on Rimworld, and it would probably piss off the gamers.
Yeah, I think someone deciding they don't want to take a review seriously if it's by someone who gave up on it quickly is fair. Especially if you're poor and paying for games, you can't get something new every day so you'd often prefer something that takes a lot of time to fully understand and appreciate, even if that comes at the expense of being a slog for the early hours.
I also imagine that declaring a specific review invalid for this reason will more often than not just be sour grapes over someone trashing a game they love. It's still not justified, but to some degree I get it. Maybe I'm visiting the wrong crowds but I think painting all of this as universally-applied mindless elitism, rather than as someone's knee-jerk reaction to criticism for their specific passion, is itself overly dismissive. You can still call that out without presenting it as a caricature.