Steven Scaife

Columbus, United States

Freelance Pop Culture Writer at Freelance

Freelance Pop Culture Writer at Slant Magazine

Writing on everything, unfortunately. Bylines at Slant, Polygon, Unwinnable, Fanbyte, Buzzfeed News, WaPo, IGN, EGM, etc. He/him. 📧 stvnscaife at gmail

Articles

Government Cheese Review - IGN

1 week ago | ign.com | Steven Scaife

The first four episodes of Government Cheese are now streaming on Apple TV+. One new episode will debut every Wednesday through May 28. It’s 1969, and God wants Hampton Chambers (David Oyelowo) to invent a self-sharpening drill. So sayeth the Lord that His loyal follower shall disrupt and innovate the field of handheld machinery—or so Hampton believes, anyway, having found religion while in prison for check fraud.
A Fiddly FTS Adventure

2 weeks ago | slantmagazine.com | Steven Scaife

You spend a lot of time—a lot of, given the current state of the world, cathartic time—stabbing, shooting, and blowing up Nazis in Commandos: Origins. From a top-down perspective, you issue orders to a half-dozen World War II soldiers, each one specialized in disciplines like sniping or explosives. The encampments your commandos must infiltrate are sprawling, each minimap splattered with red dots that signify the droves of enemies capable of sounding the alarm.
An Aimless Business Sim

2 weeks ago | slantmagazine.com | Steven Scaife

With Paradise Killer, indie developer Kaizen Game Works made waves with the electrifying stylistic brio that they brought to bear on the project. The game’s vision of a vaporwave afterlife—an occult cityscape full of trinkets to collect and clues to follow—is confident and transportive.
Flying Lotus's Atmospheric Sci-Fi Horror Thriller

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Steven Scaife

Compared to Kuso, Flying Lotus’s scatological debut feature, Ash is a much more conventional effort for the beatmaker turned filmmaker. Upon waking up on an isolated interstellar outpost, Riya (Eiza González) finds herself in near darkness, and with no memory of what happened to her. As she yanks a makeshift weapon free from the chest of one of her dead comrades, the film evokes countless video games that have themselves pledged allegiance to the likes of Alien, The Thing, and Event Horizon.
A Kinetic Yet Bloated Crime Novel Adaptation

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Steven Scaife

Apple TV’s Dope Thief, an eight-episode adaptation of Dennis Tafoya’s Philadelphia-set crime novel of the same name, is bracingly chaotic, much of its action perpetrated in the heat of the moment or by outright accident. At the same time, it’s another unfortunate example of streaming bloat. The series is exceptionally well-made, but it never lets you lose sight of the tighter, more economical story that could have been.
The Healing Power of Brewing Tea

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Steven Scaife

Alta is an accomplished fighter, an arena champion who’s dedicated and driven to be the best—until a string of losses throws her off her game and she’s sent searching for answers in a mysterious forest. She isn’t, in other words, the sort of person who might normally slow down long enough to work in a rustic tea shop. But that’s exactly what the warrior does in indie game developer Ivy Road’s charming Wanderstop, and not quite by choice.
An Arrestingly Trashy George R.R. Martin Adaptation

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Steven Scaife

At the center of Paul W.S. Anderson’s adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s short story “In the Lost Lands” is Gray Alys (Milla Jovovich), a witch whose business dealings are known to end in ironic tragedy. Nevertheless, she’s tasked to obtain the gift of transforming into a werewolf for the queen (Amara Okereke) of a city built into a mountain, and to do so, Gray Alys contracts the hunter Boyce (Dave Bautista) to take her into the titular realm.
The Scary Business of Being Old

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Steven Scaife

The namesake for James Ashcroft’s The Rule of Jenny Pen is a creepy hand puppet. Her eye sockets are empty, turning what’s otherwise a nondescript, cherubic face into something sinister. Adored by Dave Crealey (John Lithgow), she’s part of a therapy program in an elder care facility, but the therapy isn’t working, what with the man incorporating the doll into the physical and sexual abuse that he visits upon the other residents.
Unfinished History

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Steven Scaife

Firaxis’s Civilization games have always been much more fun to start than they are to finish. In the early hours, every little decision carves out space for your burgeoning empire. But as you spend thousands of in-game years amassing settlements, combat units, and technologies, what should be a nail-biting climax more often becomes a morass of busywork. All those decisions snowball into something far too big and unwieldy to steer.
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage

2 months ago | gamepressure.com | Steven Scaife |Aaron Bayne |Toby Berger

Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is a narrative adventure game, developed by Don’t Nod - a studio experienced in this genre. We're talking about a team that has such productions in their portfolio as Life is Strange, Tell Me Why, Twin Mirror or Harmony: The Fall of Reverie. The game was divided into two episodes - Bloom and Rage. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage takes us to the fictional town of Velvet Cove, located in a picturesque corner of the American state of Michigan.