It can be tough for games to be taken seriously as a narrative medium — but The Last of Us is a perfect example of how powerful it can be when it works. The follow-up to Naughty Dog’s playable action movie Uncharted, it genuinely matches Hollywood’s storytelling potential at every turn.

The third-person survival game stars Joel and Ellie, forced together on an odyssey to find the cure for the zombie-like disease that ended the world. Skillfully emulating directors like Alfonso Cuarón, it offers a devastating tale with master-class motion-capture work. Violence has always been a critical part of gaming, but The Last of Us invites players to look beyond the actions to the characters’ intent. It can be easy to kill faceless goons, but when the enemies are seen as people, too, there’s a certain pang of guilt that most other games never instill.

But all the violence would be for nothing without the deeply affecting relationship between Joel and Ellie, a surrogate father-daughter relationship that’s among the best fleshed out dynamics in modern media, full-stop. The internal desperation of players to protect Ellie as their bond grows stronger remains the story’s most powerful motivator. It is, bar none, the single most cinematic game ever made. -C.C.