I’m going to be a little grumpy about the word “rushed” for a minute. Bear with me.
You, as a player feel rushed in a given scene. Or may feel the game is short, and that’s a semi-fair criticism. It’s 150,000 words. But it’s not short and rushed. Our games are supposed to have multiple things you can pursue, and they do that in games as short as 135,000 words or as long as 600,000 words.
We’ve released games that are four times as long as Rent-a-Vice. (Maybe, fair warning: if you see a game is 150,000 words or under, you’re going to feel “rushed” regardless, because that game is never going to go into those multiple things in that amount of space in a way you will find satisfying.)
But in general I want to dispense with the notion that any of our games are rushed in terms of how fast they are written/edited. Or the criticism that this is a “draft” not a game. It’s a game. You don’t have to like how deeply the author went into things, or you may wish it were longer, but it took over a year to write and edit, it’s longer than most novels, and it’s designed to be replayable, so you can get different outcomes and do different things.
Asking “Is the game short or the story rushed” – you get two options here. Either the game is only about one thing which you pursue to whatever would be a satisfying depth for you in the space of 150,000 words, in which case your criticism would be “It’s boring! It’s only about X!” OR you get a swiftly moving (I guess, to you, “rushed”) story which has several different things to pursue.
Not all of our games are going to be 600,000 words long. If you aren’t satisfied by a game that’s 150,000 save your pennies to buy Choice of the Cat, Tally Ho, Choice of Rebels, Silverworld, Robots, Empyrean. They’re long.