With most retail games clocking in at somewhere around 20 hours, the prospect of 30 to 60 gameplay hours for an Xbox Live Arcade Game is surprising. But Marcus Savino, producer of the upcoming title Puzzle Quest: Galactrix, tells us that’s how long the game could take to complete.

Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords was released 2007 to great reviews and sales, and Puzzle Quest: Galactrix is looking to continue that tradition when it releases early next year. Savino told TGR his estimates for playing time during a hands-on preview with the game, which will also be available for PC and the Nintendo DS.

Savino said the “casual path will probably be between 20 to 30 hours, I would say, close to 30 … then for the sort of hard core experience it would have to be more like 60."

The game fuses the popular "match three colors" style of puzzle play with sci-fi themes and features. The opportunity for more gameplay hours can extend depending on how you play.

"The game is open ended enough that you can really choose. ... You can be like the hardcore player -- there are shops all over the galaxy. There are over 80 different store systems that you can travel too. There are 150 items, there are 30 ships, there is tons of stuff to do, tons of ways to level yourself up, customize your own character, customize your own sort of outfit for your ship and kind of choose your own path," Savino said.

He even suggested that 60 hours might not represent the ceiling in terms of playing time. "To do everything in the game you could possibly do, we have not calculated how long that would take. But it would definitely take over 100 hours I am sure," he said.

I guess this shows how much you can cram into 300 MB.