The Jedi Knight series* have quite some story too. When I load a save game half-way through a level after 1.5 years or so though, I have literally no idea where I was going.
* that’s as FPS as I get.
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Well, the length and number of characters is a question of opinion. I’m a busy man myself, which is why I’m constantly putting off playing all my games that require a significant time commitment. But for me, that means RPGs with 100+ hours of playtime (and even more in real life because you’re not following the optimal path) and/or games with steep learning curves. An example of a game I’d love to start, but am putting off because I can’t commit at the moment would be Wasteland 2.
Thimbleweed Park for me was pretty decent and didn’t overstay its welcome. I’m not sure whether my experience was it being just long enough, or “could’ve been longer”, but certainly not too long. I also didn’t mind the use of multiple characters, but would’ve liked more interaction. Day of the Tentacle was great in that respect.
With adventure games I don’t mind them being long, nor getting stuck on puzzles, because that’s part of the gameplay. You play a bit, get stuck, try a bunch of stuff, and if it doesn’t pan out you just give up for the day. Usually you come up with new ideas the next day, which you can test out when you come home after work.
But it’s all subjective. I can certainly understand where you come from since I feel the same about other games.
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A good example for reference is my brother, who has a wife and 1 year old son. He hardly has any time to play games anymore, but I introduced him to TWP (we both grew up playing LucasArts games, Monkey Island especially, so he was delighted to hear about Ron Gilbert again).
He said it was the perfect length. Long enough to feel like you really got your money’s worth of story and puzzles, yet short enough that the game and story flowed well and nothing ever became stale.
He played it for an hour or so here and there and it took him a couple of weeks to complete. Mind you, I think he was just cherishing it near the end
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Yeah, and just to clarify…I don’t think TWP was atrociously long or anything. Just a little longer than I would have liked, particularly after you begin controlling all 5 characters. For me, I found that I “loved” the first half, and only just “liked” the 2nd half. And so I would have preferred if the 2nd half was shorter, if that makes sense.
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These types of games are the only ones I really play, and they are made so infrequently that I think they need to be long, because they need to last me a few years until the next one!
I think splitting the game over different areas would have made it seem fresher, as we spend the whole game in one town essentially, so it feels like a lot of time in one place (and the factory section isn’t really long enough to feel like a full change of scenery)…
I liked how in Monkey Island for example we “finish” one half of the game when we leave Melee Island and start fresh once on Monkey Island. Same with Grim Fandango with different areas that are then “closed” when you’re out of them into whole new sections.
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That’s exactly what I was thinking just now. Thanks for writing down my thoughts, @Paul!
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I only want to add that the part where they all leave town (but not really) was very funny but also disappointing at the same time in this respect. Because it meant we weren’t going to new places (apart from ThimbleCon if I remember well).
Actually, your inventory gets purged at that time too, so this point is in fact similar to MI and GF’s acts/years
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TWP is more the MI2 model, with a sprawling somewhat disorienting smorgasbord of things to do. If I didn’t get much of my enjoyment out of just looking at stuff I might well get bored with the sheer amount of puzzles that aren’t necessarily all that challenging or rewarding except for the dozens of different objectives you have to keep in mind.
There was also a minor plague of executing certain puzzles because they were obviously there to be solved without really knowing why you were doing it. Which didn’t bother me much, but I can certainly see how it could contribute to the game feeling a bit lengthy.
You could try some new games that take the genre in new directions, like Oxenfree and Life Is Strange, or of course Telltale’s masterpiece The Walking Dead that arguably revived the genre. 
There are also interesting innovations like Tacoma, even if I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that one, and I hear Return of the Obra Dinn is good too. The Monkey Island mold is a good one, but the genre stagnated a bit for some 20 years following its release. Or perhaps mainly for the following decade until it committed suicide.
We also seem to have plenty of great throwback games to go around. Unforeseen Incidents is an excellent example. The Wadjet Eye games come out regularly and they’re at least interesting if not simply good. Primordia and Unavowed are the stand-outs for me, but Shardlight, Technobabylon and Gemini Rue are worth a look.
/rant 
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Yeah, Grim Fandango was especially rich in this aspect. I remember playing it as a kid for the first time, and leaving El Marrow, going to the Petrified Forest, then ending up in Rubacava (my favourite area of the game), and it just seemed epic already at that point. I just walked around and took it all in
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