Lafazar: That depends completely on your puzzle solving skills and if you're willing to skip them or not (you can skip a puzzle without beating it by visiting the hint book in the library three times in a row). Content-wise, the game can be beat in a few hours including seeing all cutscenes and scene transitions if you know the solutions or look them up.
It took me weeks to beat when I was little, because I simply refused to skip any of the puzzles and there was no internet at that time. I was proud of that then, but in hindsight, too many of the puzzles are either trivially simple or senselessly hard with few hitting the interesting middle ground.
Awesome. I think I'm fairly decent at puzzles, so I figure I'll be trying to skip the hint book. But it's good to know a general estimate, so thanks a lot for the detailed and helpful answer.
Been playing for a few hours already, and I noticed that this game has a oddly great atmosphere. I was expecting it to be pretty goofy like most FMV games, but I have to say I was genuinely creeped out on a couple of occasions. It helps that I was playing at 2am, in the dark, with a thunderstorm outside. Seemed like the ideal conditions at the time, but now I keep jumping at every noise. Oh well, who needs to sleep anyway.
