Is there any listing of how many words each story has? I prefer long, epic stories, but not all summaries include word-length and there are a LOT of stories on this site. This is just a minor detail, but I would like to save myself some time if I can.
Thank you.
I think really long ones are
Iron destines
Tin star
Mecha ace
Every Choice of Games title lists the word count in the description. So far our longest Choice of Games titles, off the top of my head:
-Choice of Rebels (600k+)
-Choice of the Cat (600k+)
-Choice of Robots (300k+)
-Empyrean (300k+)
-Heart of the House (300k+)
-Vampire 2 (300k)
Tin Star is probably the longest one out there, 1,2 million words I believe, and it’s damn good.
I think magikiras has around 1 mil words…its quite good story i reccomed it
So, I looked up the games and wrote down the number of words for each game (some of the games don’t have the number listed in the intro description, so I only have those that had the number listed). Here’s the list I have of both CoG and Hosted Games (only gonna list games w/ 200,000+ words).
I’d love to see if there’s any correlation between word count and gross sales, but I don’t have access to sales figures. 
It’s also worth while noting that the total words, does not always mean “epic” length. It can mean increased branching. For exmaple Iron Destinies is at number 6, but has a number of stories that branch from the beginning. Not one very long one. So it depends if your the kind of person who likes finding all the branches or if you only read something once or twice. If you’re in the latter category, you’ll want something linear.
Anyone maybe have the additional wordcount per playthrough?
Very interesting thread. It would be very interesting to do a correlation between total length and reviewer rating… mmmm let me see…
length, playthrough length and review maybe.
It seems (unfortunately) common that people give a low rating to a game with a huge total count but only relatively short playthroughs.
(To which I ask once more: Why do you play an interactive novel if you intend on only playing it ONCE?)
Doubt it. You’d need the authors to supply playthrough via running random tests.
Some are definitely known for being more linear than others though (which could be a good or bad thing depending on if you like replayablity, and there’s definitely a sliding scale from very railroaded to very widely branched without a single “central storyline”). If in doubt, I’d ask the advice of the forum for a particular story if it is of particular sticking point as to whether you’d buy something.
Edit: you’d be surprised how many people do only play interactive novels once or twice (there have been a few discussions on it a while back but can’t remember where to find them 
)
Still find it a bit weird, especially when people then go and say that a story with many branches was ‘too short’ and how they were promised 200k+ words…
Holy crap, 1million words… I need to redownload that game again
Yeah, very common unfortunately. I actually kind of like some of the more traditional branching stories, but the fact is, unless they’re very long to get the word count right up, they tend to get a lot of poor “too short” reviews in the store which is probably why you get fewer of them being written in the first place. They can be done, they’re just a lot more work than linear plots and you have to hope people realise they’re not linear, because you’re right I have seen a number of reviews in the app stores saying “this was no where near x number of words” even for some of the less branchy ones as well.
I actually didn’t realize how rare it was still to have games over 300K words. But there’s going to be one more reasonably soon - Choice of Magics is currently at 450K words as I write the last chapter.
Make that two more.
The Cryptkeepers of Hallowford clocks in at around 360k words at the moment.
Three more: Tally Ho is 620K words!
That’s exactly what I was asking for! Thanks!
Make that four more: The Magician’s Enigma will likely be 350k.