7 Video Games That Aren't About What You Think

Unlike other bits of entertainment like movies and TV shows, it's much harder to stay up-to-date with everything new in the video game space.

You've got episodes of WandaVision that are 30 minutes long, and Hollywood blockbusters that run for a sprightly two hours, but when it comes to games? Even the shortest of titles can take upwards of ten hours to get through, meaning that most of us just don't have the bandwidth to play everything that hits store shelves.

As a result, a lot of folks can get the wrong idea about certain games - games they might have only seen a trailer for, or others that they might have only played for an hour or two.

Some games look quite generic on the surface, but actually have rich stories and layered characters that you'd only know about if you sat down and experienced them. Other games have vastly different gameplay from what you initially expected, or hidden meanings that you never thought would be there.

To put it another way, looks can be deceiving, and there's a lot more to these games than you probably think there is.

For almost a decade and a half, Media Molecule has been known as a studio that produces games with a heavy emphasis on creating, with LittleBigPlanet and Dreams both driving that image. Both titles feature in-depth toolsets that allow players to create pretty much any kind of level they can imagine, from a frenetic multiplayer racer, to an intricately-designed top-down dungeon crawler.

Unfortunately however, Media Molecule's reputation as a developer of creation tools has led to the perception that you won't get as much out of its games if you want to simply play them - and this is especially true with Dreams.

Dreams has struggled to attract a wide audience, and this is partly due to the fact that people think it's a pure creator tool. You can't blame your average Joe for this (almost every bit of promotion the game received has pushed a "come and create levels with us!" angle), and most people, understandably, don't want to have to build their own cool stages - they want the developer to do that for them.

But unbeknownst to many, that's exactly what Media Molecule did.

On top of its phenomenal creation suite, Dreams also boasts a single-player campaign called Art's Dream, which, while short, is a terrific experience that mixes together multiple different styles of gameplay to create something truly unique.

Combined with the thousands of community levels available to check out, you can quite easily buy Dreams and be fulfilled by just playing it, even though its marketing - which over-emphasised the creation aspect - gave many the opposite impression.