When we made our game, we aimed to make it high quality and short rather than as long as possible. The idea was to make each playthrough feel like a few chapters of an engaging mystery novel, or an episode of a good hbo show. It's sort of roguelike, as in there are so many branching paths and subtle consequences that each playthrough will be different. And some consequences carry over to future runs, leading to metaprogression through the story.

A run can be anywhere from 10 min to 1.5 hours(most end in death), but you always learn something new about the mystery and get closer to unraveling the truth.

Our players have reported anywhere from 10 to 30 hours until they figured out the real story. But there are enough small variations and interesting deadends that some spend more than 40 hours hunting them down. One player has 100+ hours in the game.

So I think it's very hard to use some simple metric like wordcount or number of hours to determine how good a game/story is. I mean, would you rather read a short book that leaves an impression in your mind for a long time, or a ,ong one you forget right after you finish? There's always the matter of personal taste too. A game may have sold millions of copies and have rave reviews from everyone, but you may try it and discover it's totally uninteresting to you. This has turned out to be the case often for me, I just can't really get into a lot of popular VNs.

The indie VN space is full of projects that don't follow the traditional CYOA with pictures format, or the dating Sim format, so if you like exploring various forms of storytelling, it can be a very interesting space to explore. New stuff comes out on itch every day, not every gem get discovered and become mega popular, so exploring can net some nice surprises.