Uncharted: The Lost Legacy shows that filmic games can still be screen magic

Naughty Dog's long-running, much-garlanded series aces the Bechdel test and breaks new boundaries with two female leads

Throughout the latter half of the 1990s, video games were often talked about as a looming threat to cinema. The advent of CD-Rom technology promoted the medium's blocksome characters from avatars to actors, complete with lines of dialogue written by professional scriptwriters and spoken by performers loaned from TV and film. Soaring orchestral soundtracks backed three-act structures and, as games popped from 2D to 3D, the composition of scenes, lighting and lines of sight became concerns for digital directors as well as film.

At some point the trajectory shifted. Games still borrow filmic techniques, but the truly cinematic video game - that which seeks to mimic the characterisation, structure and run-time of a blockbuster movie - is endangered, squeezed out by world-conquering, team-based eSports on one side and, on the other, everlasting online worlds where the game's geography expands to match the player's wanderlust. Naughty Dog remains one of the few purveyors of the filmic game. The American studio's flagship Uncharted series remains the final bastion of this expensive, sophisticated form of game-making, earning plaudits from Hollywood-preeners such as Bafta and the Writer's Guild of America.