This is a followup to @SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net 's recent thread for completeness' sake.
I'll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre... in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of "doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book" puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
The last of us is a lot more than a grizzled dude with a gun, especially the second game . That's just what braindead Chuds who've never played the games stereotype it as. Even the first game has LGBT characters and some form of a complex story.
Neat
I was so burnt out on zombie games and the Last of Us part 1 was just the final straw. It's especially galling having people preach that it's some magnificent new horizon for story-telling and being profoundly disappointed finding out that it's just more of the same.