Review: The Casting of Frank Stone Meanders too Much to be Thrilling

Behaviour Interactive allowing Supermassive Games, who previously developed the 90’s slasher inspired Until Dawn, to create a more “cinematic” title set within the Dead by Daylight universe seems like an optimal choice. However, Supermassive Games carries in the same flaws and meandering and uninteresting direction that has plagued the developer since The Dark Picture Anthology‘s Little Hope.

Within the first hour of trudging through The Casting of Frank Stone I was so bored I was on the verge of tears. Because while the game does have some interesting narrative threads (particularly the stuff concerned with lore connected to Dead by Daylight’s mysterious Entity), the character writing is cliched and at worst, just uninteresting. The tale begins in the 1960’s, where players assume the role of a sheriff sent to investigate the disappearance of an infant. The game warns you that your choices will have consequences, much like every Supermassive Game, place a deep emphasis on player choice and how these actions could ripple outward.

From there you bounce between the 1960’s, 1980’s, and 2024 — with a different cast of characters to play in each decade. Something as simple as trusting a character with a bit of information impacting characters you meet throughout the established timeline. However, this isn’t always the case. It felt like some decisions were just there to add tension when there wasn’t any, just to warn me that I might have done something wrong or potentially killed a character when all routes ended up leading to the same outcome anyways. There are a few deviations here and there, but when I had to figure out how to get my hands on a new camera for an aspiring group of filmmakers, there wasn’t much actual choice to be had.

All of these characters are also interconnected through the titular character, Frank Stone, in some way, and a supposedly cursed movie that was filmed where this mysterious killer met his end. Which I guess is supposed to make the narrative more compelling, but it all felt kind of lazy. It felt like a way to try and add stakes and pull something out of the player when something bad does happen to a character. I won’t be elaborating on this for the sake of spoilers, but this was definitely something I was able to spot a mile away. Which isn’t a bad thing. Cliches and tropes have existed in media and continue to exist in media for a reason, and when these ideas are executed on properly, they can be extremely compelling! Even in B-horror films, or games that give off the same kind of vibe.

But this has always been an issue for Supermassive Games, and continues to be an issue here. Along with the general pacing and direction of scenes. The game either goes at a breakneck pace or is agonizingly slow. The two hours of the game after the prologue chapter had me falling asleep in my chair, even if the narrative kept dangling bits of more interesting story or gameplay in front of me. Because The Casting of Frank Stone is as it’s best when it’s more Dead by Daylight than one of Supermassive Games’ attempt at making a playable horror film.

I loved the little touches that reminded me of a game I enjoyed significantly more. The incorporation of scratch marks (a mechanic from Dead by Daylight that shows a killer where you’ve been sprinting towards survival) or little bits of lore tied directly into Behaviour Interactive’s asymmetrical horror game. You can pick up little artifacts throughout the game that are nods to the game’s Killers, and the antagonist of The Casting of Frank Stone does shed some light on the ominous Entity that has pulled some of the most twisted individuals and their soon-to-be victims into these weird little pocket dimensions that have been frozen in time that exists in a realm beyond ours.

But scenes drag on, the motion capture in a lot of them have prioritized facial capture over refining the whole of the performance of the actor, and transitions after making choices can be clunky and awkward. For those unfamiliar with Supermassive Games’ catalogue, their games function are playable films where you do some light walking and exploration while choosing how to react to characters and do a QTE here and there to ensure the survival of the cast. It’s sort of like a choose your own adventure novel, just a lot more linear. It worked for Until Dawn, even if it isn’t my favorite horror game or kind of horror game, because of how it managed to balance these systems. The Casting of Frank Stone has an uneven mix, and you’ll be sitting through characters chatting amongst one another for upwards of twenty or thirty minutes before actually being allowed to do something, until maybe something more exciting happens that has you interested, only for it to cool down again or for you to be forced to solve uninteresting puzzle or engage in boring combat.

If you do want to see how a different decision might have shaken out, you don’t need to play the game again at the very least. Instead you can take advantage of the “Cutting Room Floor” option, which allows you to jump in at specific points in the story to see how a different choice might have gone. Unfortunately, you cannot skip cutscenes or right to the decision in question, even if you’ve seen the scene before. So you’re stuck there waiting for fifteen or so minutes of the same, grating dialogue just to see if deciding to repair a camera at an old curio shop or the local pharmacy will have any other real outcome.

The game also has some issues when it comes to textures popping in, and was struggling on my PC even at medium settings. Thankfully the subtitles are easy to read, but there were some inconsistencies in terms of how the subtitles would display actions. Sometimes they would be in brackets, other times they wouldn’t. But the game does have a fair amount of accessibility options ranging from text size, controller vibration, and even changing the kinds of QTE’s you can get, or if they can time out.

For those that want to loop their friends into the fun, there is a multiplayer mode that facilitates five different players. However, there is only local multiplayer, which means that you have to physically hand over your controller to whoever you’re playing with. I imagine players on PC might be able to finagle something where you’ll be able to remote play with friends or family, but I didn’t test that out.

Overall, The Casting of Frank Stone is an interesting attempt at feeding Dead by Daylight fans more lore through different means. I think there’s a lot of potential there, but so much of the game could have just remained on the cutting room floor, tightening up the tension and overall experience to make it a more engrossing B-horror flick. Because there isn’t anything wrong with bad or corny, it just isn’t enough to be so bad that it’s good. It’s just kind of there, and it’s a game I won’t be playing again.

The Casting of Frank Stone is available for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X.

PC Specs:

• Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core Processor
• RAM: 32-GB
• Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

5.5

The Casting of Frank Stone

The shadow of Frank Stone looms over Cedar Hills, a town forever altered by his violent past. As a group of young friends are about to discover, Stone’s blood-soaked legacy cuts deep, leaving scars across families, generations, and the very fabric of reality itself.

Food for Thought

• The game is at it's strongest when it incorporates mechanics from Dead by Daylight
• While made for Dead by Daylight fans it's still interesting as a stand-alone story
• The sound design is great if you're using headphones

A copy of this game was provided by the publisher for review. Reviewed on PC.