I'll give it to you that I wasn't being the best human being ever when I wrote that last part and that maybe I should just have kept it to myself. Rereading it know, and it was way too strongly worded. My god... I really don't want to be an a-hole, and if I upset anyone with what I said I wholeheartedly apologize. Again, I really don't like being a knob, so I'm sorry if I was.
That being said, there is loads more you can do with any premise than what a particular dev, writer, film maker, you name it, ended up doing with it. Taking basic concepts from other media and interpreting it in their own way is one of the basic ways in which creators make more things. Of course, if it's basically the same thing the whole way through but either condensed into a summary or fleshed out with more detail and conversations, that's a form of plagiarism, that's bad, and no one should do that. However, a new story doesn't have to follow the same beats as what came before. It's totally possible for a creator to come along, be inspired by something (either in a positive or negative way), and make it their own. They can execute a premise in such a different way that, yes it may be clear the fruit of their labour has the same basic idea behind it as its source, but be a wholly different creation in nearly every aspect. Every high fantasy story written after The Lord of the Rings came out or every space opera following Dune can be described with "that, but different". Of course, the more specific a premise is formulated the higher the risk of plagiarism, so maybe I shouldn't have been as precise as I was. But what I was suggesting was not to take the story of Hexed, add bits to it, and turn (for example) the walks into a written paragraph. Neither was I suggesting to take the first x minutes, not change it at all, and then go from there. I agree that would be quite rude. If it turns out we actually agree but it was a terrible misunderstanding due to poor communication on my part, I apologize for that too.
As for the game's length, that's entirely subjective. Different people have different amounts of free time and a different number of things they would like to do or explore with that free time. I for one have a neverending backlog of games I want to play all the way through because I know I'll like them, or at least try out because I think I might enjoy them (and that's not even saying anything about the books I want to read). Therefore I always ask myself the question: "Is what I'm doing right now fun? Is it worth the time investment when there are so many other things that I could be doing instead that will or could be more satisfying?" The shorter something is, the less time I have to start feeling bothered. For me, something is too long if those questions have popped up with a certain frequency and the answer is a definite no. 4-5 hours may be short in the grand scheme of things, I'm not arguing against that, but for someone with my tastes Hexed was still too long. That is all I was saying.
(Also, while you can assign the menu to the i key, you can't go straight to the items screen. You have to press enter first. It's a minor thing, but still.)