Steven Scaife


107 games reviewed
64.9 average score
60 median score
45.5% of games recommended
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Unscored - Redfall
May 8, 2023

The more fantastical elements of Redfall fail to impress, but the everyday detail of its setting manages to shine through, surfacing little stories left in the wreckage. The problem is that, even if you’re willing to dig for those moments, they’re still overshadowed by the glimpses of another, larger story: the one that explains how Redfall came to be released in such a state as this.

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These issues are not unique to “The Devil in Me.” “The Quarry” often felt uneasily patched together, struggling to reconcile all of its plot threads. All of this raises a question that haunts the experience of Supermassive’s games: Amid players’ expectations of visual fidelity and complex narrative, how sustainable is a format where, at any point, any fully voice-acted, motion-captured character can die and be cut from the game in an instant?

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Unscored - Carto
Nov 11, 2020

Carto gets a lot of brain-bending mileage from its central mechanic.

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Unscored - Mr. Sun's Hatbox
Apr 30, 2023

Much of the game involves strategizing around these quirks when possible. Upon snapping a guard's neck, for example, the "guilty conscience" trait sends your character hopping around in an uncontrollable panic for a few brief yet potentially pivotal seconds during which they might blunder into a trap or the sightline of another guard. To circumvent this, you can take care to kill exclusively (and presumably more impersonally) with weapons, or you can drag each body to some secluded area where it's safe for your assigned agent to shake off any post-murder jitters.

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Unscored - Phantom Brigade
Mar 1, 2023

I’d be able to forgive these UI foibles if they contributed to a cohesive thematic style. The busy interface of a game like Highfleet appears even more inscrutable than Phantom Brigade, but it funnels its droves of information into a gorgeously intricate cockpit UI. The sliding gray menus of Phantom Brigade, on the other hand, are bland and indistinct. The bare-bones story and setting, with their anonymous blue and red factions, could very well pass for a placeholder. The game’s unique command system manages to capture what is so intrinsically awe-inspiring about giant, fickle robots battling other giant, fickle robots — but the surrounding framework lacks the same refinement and clarity of purpose.

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Unscored - Scorn
Oct 14, 2022

By the time the parasite does finally obstruct your ability to use machines or change weapons, the damage is already done. There are few enemies left and the game is almost over, so whatever additional tension might have resulted from these restrictions never materializes. Scorn is a transportive experience to be sure, at times a genuine masterwork of visual craft. But the unfulfilled possibilities linger a little too prominently, a reminder that it falls short of being a mechanical masterpiece, too.

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Coupled with the rest of the game’s failings, it becomes apparent that whatever more complex aspirations Alone in the Dark might have wanted to realize, it didn’t have the resources to achieve them. Its greatest achievement is that, rather than releasing in some broken and clearly unfinished state, it has managed to reach the level of being merely bad instead.

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It experiments with all the weakest parts of the series and ties them together with a new, tedious progression system.

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Apr 25, 2019

The game meets the baseline level of quality we might expect from a big-budgeted joint, yet it remains a tiresome, empty experience.

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Aug 5, 2018

This Is the Police 2 never contemplates police brutality, wrongful arrests, or anything whatsoever about race.

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Dec 6, 2017

Black Mirror often alludes to the Gothic classics that inspired it, to stories full of disturbing, evil forces that threaten to overtake their characters, but the only unsettling thing about it is a glut of technical issues.

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Jan 18, 2023

Perhaps Colossal Cave’s unthinking fealty to the original, and its seeming dismissal of so many of the innovations that might have improved it, could be forgiven if it featured any puzzles or mechanics that would be tough to replicate in a modern design context. But no such innovations are apparent, and new touches like the first-person camera create new problems like making it easy to miss important items in the cave. Colossal Cave, then, can hardly be called a “modernization,” because it would have felt antiquated even if it came out 20 years ago.

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Mar 31, 2022

Playing Weird West, it’s hard to shake how much more gracefully other games of this type avoid similar pitfalls, with the abbreviated scavenging of Void Bastards and the easy-to-read interface of Desperados III, another western with a top-down perspective, immediately coming to mind. The latter game also supports far more complex maneuvers despite lacking the sort of pointless granularity that has the player comb through indistinguishable shelves for a handful of ammunition. By contrast, Weird West is a slog dying for an extensive streamline.

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- Sifu
Feb 6, 2022

Though Sifu features a few dialogue choices and scenes throughout its campaign where you don’t have to fight anyone, its surface-level engagement with martial arts film iconography betrays a lack of humanity that feels typical of works created well outside of the culture that they intend to depict. The game’s story grouses about the downsides of seeking vengeance, but this is plainly the work of people who like to fast forward to the fight scenes.

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Jul 21, 2021

Eventually, each story hurriedly resolves itself, foregoing tidy lessons or ironic endings but still lacking that crucial, elusive sense of lived-in authenticity. For as much effort has clearly gone into voicing and animating these characters within their 3D environments, we never spend enough time to seem like we really know them; quirks of the game’s strict linearity ensure we remain at a distance, observing relationships that are otherwise too thinly sketched to sustain the game’s emotional ambitions. Last Stop eventually arrives at an all-too-familiar game-design destination, hamstrung by its attempts at verisimilitude.

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Jul 22, 2020

Few of the game's problems would be insurmountable in the face of an engaging narrative.

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The game's themes feel like facile wallpaper over mechanics that feed into the ideas being critiqued.

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Jul 11, 2019

Its repetitive tasks are like the usual arbitrary gates to reach a cutscene in a mediocre video game.

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Apr 10, 2018

Extinction compensates for a lack of variety by treating every minor detail as a momentous occasion.

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Oct 31, 2023

But all that feels incongruent with the game’s source material. Perhaps it’s a bit naïve to hope that any social commentary can survive decades of franchising, but Rogue City’s handling of RoboCop leaves hardly a trace of his origins as a commentary on police violence and militarization. All the time you spend clomping around the faithfully rendered interior of the police station is in service of selling the cops as a force for good, with RoboCop’s actions emphatically meant to make the world a better place. There’s even a dialogue option to call the police a “family,” now totally decoupled from standard sci-fi corporate malfeasance. Rogue City has clearly put a lot of thought and effort into replicating the world of this character, but it does so within a mechanical and narrative framework that never quite fits.

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