The Simpsons - So naughty dog got woke

One company that took a similar path of moving away from cartoony games to more serious ones was Crystal Dynamics, but they did it a lot sooner (and interestingly both companies share a common element of Amy Henning once working for them). CD used to be best known for stuff like Gex, but once they moved onto the Legacy of Kain series they've stuck solely to games that are dark and gritty. Once they got the reigns to Tomb Raider the series also got progressively more gritty as it went on (though the latest game switched developers due to CD being busy with the new Avengers game, this also ended up with a switch in writers because Rhianna Pratchett wrote the stories for the 2013 reboot and Rise of the Tomb Raider, but Shadow had two different writers).

I guess the difference though is because Crystal Dynamics did this way earlier they were able to better cement themselves with a reputation for making dark games, but Naughty Dog did it slowly. The beginning was with the Jack and Daxter series moving away from being a Mario 64 esque platformer into an edgy T-rated GTA clone, then Uncharted ditching cartoony characters in favor of humans but still having some Indiana Jones like story telling, and then finally just going full "world of gloom and doom" with Last of Us.

Neil Cuckmann happened.