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.

To date, the Uncharted series has principally followed the exploits of Nathan Drake, a stubbled, quipping tomb raider in the Indiana Jones matinee mould. Drake has been followed by an orbiting constellation of women, who have often vied for his attention as love interests or scolded him for his behaviour in disapproving mother-wife roles. Last month’s add-on chapter to the Uncharted universe, The Lost Legacy, changes all of that. Focus is ceded to Chloe Frazer (former Drake love interest) and Nadine Ross (former Drake adversary), a pair of rival treasure hunters forced to co-operate in a race with a notorious war profiteer to recover a fabled Indian artefact.

At a glance, The Lost Legacy seems merely to follow Hollywood’s example again, albeit a couple of decades too late. Many commercial video games are fronted by women, but few feature a pair of female leading characters. There is no Thelma and Louise of gaming, for example. The Lost Legacy seems, then, to fill a long-vacant commercial spot. In fact it’s anything but. Chloe and Nadine neither like one another, nor, when taken in isolation, prove to be especially likable. They bicker and snipe, jostling for both the best lines and the best headshots. This is, it transpires, much more than a mere gender-swap buddy game. The relationship between the women warms pleasingly and briskly, showing a masterly sense of pace and poise in the writing and understatement in the voice actors’ performance.

It’s not the first time that Naughty Dog has sought to suckerpunch its way through the Bechdel test while presenting a cliche-ducking on-screen relationship. 2014’s The Last of Us: Left Behind (another smaller postscript game notably released after the main, male-fronted attraction) told the story of two teenage girls, negotiating not only the perils of a postapocalyptic American landscape, but also the shifting sands of their adolescent best-friendship. It was a tale that the video game critic Keza MacDonald cited as the first mainstream, big-budget game to depict a meaningful and believable relationship between two adolescent girls, a moment, MacDonald wrote at the time, that “I didn’t even know I’d been waiting for until it happened”.

Cinematic video games in the Uncharted style are often criticised for sidestepping the medium’s strengths in their earnest, cleaving tributes to cinema. There is little room for nonlinear stories, freedom of control or those unscripted moments of unexpected delight and humour that bejewel the best video games. Yet The Lost Legacy shows the value and power of this increasingly rare mode of game-making and its ability not only to ape, but occasionally outplay, cinema’s efforts.