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The Casting of Frank Stone review

VaselineSeptember 4, 2024

0 5 minutes read

Developer Supermassive Games once challenged us to survive until dawn, now the interactive slasher film specialist wants us dead by daylight in The Casting of Frank Stone. This narrative-driven spinoff of the popular asymmetrical multiplayer sneak-and-slash ’em up attempts to build a backstory for the malevolent source of all evil in the Dead by Daylight universe, known only as The Entity. However, stale, quicktime-event-heavy gameplay, woefully shallow combat, an underdeveloped cast of characters, and a complete absence of jump scares make for a six-hour grind that’s barely worth staying up past your bedtime for.

While Dead by Daylight’s cast of characters is expanded to include a who’s who of nightmarish horror icons like Leatherface from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and even walking internet memes like Nicholas Cage, The Casting of Frank Stone features an entirely original cast of villains and potential victims. This is to the story’s detriment, as barely any of them leave much of a lasting impression. Head monster Frank Stone (Miles Ley) is certainly an imposing figure in the story’s prologue, but he’s nowhere to be seen for a long time afterwards. Instead, we’re saddled with a truly unremarkable cast in a tepid story that bounces between filming a low-budget horror flick in an abandoned Cedar Rapids steel mill in 1980 and a secret meeting of strangers in an isolated English country house in the present.

Bad estates

While it may be messy and not the least bit memorable, The Casting of Frank Stone’s story certainly has plenty of branching paths, and that goes for its environments as well. Unfortunately, while the grimy underground tunnels beneath the Cedar Rapids steel mill and the gloomy, gilded halls of Gerant Manor certainly exude plenty of atmosphere, they’re just not all that interesting or intimidating to explore. Worse still, they’re reused far too often – time and again, I found myself trudging past the same bits of scenery like I was a member of Spinal Tap desperately searching for the stage entrance. I spent the vast majority of my time tapping out basic button prompts in cutscenes, so it felt especially limiting that when I did occasionally get full control over a character, I so rarely got anything interesting to see or do.

There are a number of simple survival horror puzzles to complete, such as pushing crates or finding keys, and, in one of the many nods to the core Dead by Daylight universe, you’re faced with the occasional generator that needs repairing to power an elevator or door. However, while the process of repairing these simple mechanisms in Dead by Daylight is transformed into bouts of gut-wrenching panic as you’ve got a murderous Michael Myers from Halloween closing in on your position, here the absence of any stalking threat means they’re robbed of any real urgency, and instead just feel like more basic quicktime events to be obediently punished. It’s neat that they’ve included the Dead by Daylight skill check prompt here, but it does little to enhance the actual interactions in any meaningful way.

While I never had any trouble fixing the generators, I do wish someone had taken the time to fix The Casting of Frank Stone’s inability to generate jump scares. Outside of the life-or-death cutscene decisions, the rare enemy encounters are otherwise trivialized by a powerfully weaponized camera that transforms from Super 8 to supernatural. There’s only ever one entity-controlled Frank Stone ghost to take on at a time, and all you have to do is point the camera’s viewfinder at them and press record to drain them of all their life force. Their presence is always clearly indicated, and as a result they never caught up to me or got close enough to pose any real threat—I’m not sure they’re capable of launching any attacks at all, as they effectively remained at a comfortable widescreen in my viewfinder; never a murderous close-up. Dead by Daylight may be capable of some truly terrifying stalker escapes, but The Casting of Frank Stone is about as stressful as a hot tub by comparison.

Death by design

Of course, this being a Supermassive Games adventure, some characters can and probably will die. But in my experience with The Casting of Frank Stone, it was either because I happily let them go, or because I was sipping coffee and was too slow to pick up my controller during an unexpected and clearly very important cutscene transition. Roughly half the cast of playable characters were dead before the credits rolled, and while I was glad to see that some of those executions were ripped straight from Dead by Daylight – such as impaling one particular victim on the sharp end of a dangling hook – I can’t say that any of these unremarkable meatbags met their sudden deaths in a particularly inspired or shocking manner.

Once the campaign is completed, you’ll unlock a Cutting Room Floor feature that lets you retrace any branching story path and jump back to specific scenes, allowing you to pick up a storyline and spin it in a new direction by making a different decision and seeing how things play out. It’s a nice feature if you want to experience all possible outcomes, but I wish it were a little more flexible – preventing one character from dying required me to replay six scenes leading up to the moment that determined their fate, rather than jumping straight to that pivotal decision and continuing from there, which seemed annoyingly cumbersome.

Still, this branching chapter selection certainly comes in handy if you want to go back and find Dead by Daylight-inspired collectibles, with signature killers like The Trapper and The Clown shrunk down to adorable, Chuckie-sized plushies and hidden throughout each setting. This is in addition to countless other nods to the multiplayer killing sim, like The Huntress’s bunny mask that I found on a shelf in the Cedar Rapids curio shop. Dead by Daylight diehards will likely get a kick out of discovering all of these things, but whether they’re worth playing (let alone replaying) a fairly forgettable horror story depends on how loyal your fandom is.