Two people can buy the same game and finish it ten hours apart, and skill has little to do with it. IGN sent six staff members through the Resident Evil 4 remake and published every one of their times: the fastest reached the credits in 12 hours, the slowest in 22.
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Why one game produces six different numbers
The IGN staff were not playing at different speeds so much as playing different games inside the same one. Tristan Ogilvie took just under 16 hours and still finished only 61 of the game’s 101 challenges and 15 of its 19 merchant side quests. Ronny Barrier spent about 17 hours and cleared roughly half the merchant requests. Brian Altano took the full 22 hours chasing every treasure and side quest he could find, and still had cleanup left for a second run. Jesse Gomez finished in just under 12 hours, doing many of the merchant’s side missions but leaving a few behind.
None of that is a story about who is better at the game. It is a story about which parts of the game each of them chose to play. A time on its own says nothing until you know what it includes.
Main story against everything the game holds
That is why the more useful reviews split the number in two, or three. Kotaku puts Star Wars Outlaws’ main campaign at 15 to 20 hours if you ignore the open world around it. Reaching every trophy, which means top standing with every faction, every planet area found, and all 40 contracts done, pushes that up to 40 hours.
Eurogamer’s own playthrough of Control Resonant took 27 to 28 hours, including a couple of the game’s 18 side stories and time spent gathering upgrades around the city. Sticking to the 23 main missions alone would have taken 24 to 25 hours instead. Chasing every side story, upgrade point, and collectible stretches a run to 37 to 43 hours. Remedy, the studio behind the game, quotes a rounder 30 hours for the story and about 50 for a completionist run, already a few hours apart from its own reviewer’s count.
When the game itself sets the clock
Sometimes the spread has nothing to do with side content at all. The Blood of Dawnwalker gives its hero, Coen, no fixed quest line to follow. He is free to challenge the villain holding his family at any point after the prologue, and the game counts down 30 in-game days either way.
Rush him on an easy setting and you can reach that fight in five to 10 hours. Play at a relaxed pace on the normal setting instead, taking time to explore and gear up, and you will more likely reach it around day 20, after roughly 30 hours of play. Choose a harder setting, and using the full 30 days to strengthen Coen before the final fight can put a completionist run past 50 hours. The prologue alone runs about three hours, though the game lets you skip ahead through it.
That range is not down to reflexes. It is a structural choice: a countdown built into the design, which a player either races against or uses in full.
The same question, at franchise scale
Add up enough of these individual answers and the totals stop looking like an evening and start looking like a second job. A separate site, howlong.is, estimates the time to clear a whole series rather than one game. By its count, the 16 mainline Final Fantasy games together run 350 to 450 hours, and the run from Dark Souls through Elden Ring lands at 150 to 200.
The number worth trusting is the one closest to how you actually play
A single headline figure for “how long” a game takes flattens a question that has at least three honest answers, and sometimes a fourth from the studio itself. The Blood of Dawnwalker shows that the gap is not always about how much a player wants to see. Sometimes the game has already decided how long it will let you take.
Before trusting any number, check what it was measuring: the credits, the trophy list, or a clock the developer built into the story.
