Adaptations of books serve an obvious purpose: They make substantial something you’d previously only imagined. The joy of watching Game of Thrones as a reader was seeing the dragons rendered, or hearing the “The Rains of Castamere” for the first time—even if you knew the song was heralding the atrocities of the Red Wedding.

A video-game adaptation doesn’t have the same raison d’être. Arguably very few have improved upon their source material. Visuals from the medium’s leading studios, like Naughty Dog, rival the best visual effects in television and film. Many critics would argue not only that Naughty Dog’s Indiana Jones–esque Uncharted adventure games looked far better than last y…