The Casting of Frank Stone

The Casting of Frank Stone takes a more measured approach to storytelling than The Dark Pictures Anthology, Until Dawn or The Quarry. It spends a long time getting to know its relatively small cast. When the scares and horror really kick in, they pack a punch because we’ve come to care about the characters. Excellent cinematic visual direction, an engaging mystery and top-notch voice acting are the stars of a game-slash-movie easily worth the price of a ticket.

The Casting Of Frank Stone is an evolution of the formula Supermassive Games have been cultivating for years. A strong diverse cast with wonderful voice acting helps propel the intense and chilling moments on display in this horror tale. Great quality of life improvements and innovations create strong benchmarks for interactive games. Whilst a rushed and muddled final act and the lack of co-op hurt the games overall appeal, there’s more than enough for horror fans to enjoy. Dead By Daylight fans will have an absolute blast with this game, as I did. See you in the fog!

Though The Casting of Frank Stone doesn’t make any sweeping changes to the formula etched out by the likes of Until Dawn, The Quarry and The Dark Pictures Anthology, it does manage to effectively marry up that formula with the universe of Dead by Daylight with impressive results. Notably, the usual flaws also apply here, with The Casting of Frank Stone beset by the same plodding horror adventuring, wooden dialogue and mostly annoying cast of characters that are usually the hallmarks of similar efforts. If however, you’re fine with all of that and just want another handsomely made Supermassive Games romp then The Casting of Frank Stone will surely appeal. Should you be a devoted Dead by Daylight aficionado though, feel free to add a point or more to the score and dive in.

On one hand we have a team that has always sacrificed interactivity in the name of a cinematic experience, on the other hand there is an online video game that has never made an effort to tell a real story: the meeting between these two extreme visions of the medium has given life to a strange hybrid with a fully Supermassive gameplay structure, chock-full of references to Behaviour's work but narratively lean and devoid of the fun thrills that we would have expected from the team of Until Dawn and The Quarry. Completely devoted to exploring the lore of Dead by Daylight, The Casting of Frank Stone forgets to lay out a plot that can intrigue its audience, bringing on stage a narration castrated by serious problems of pacing and a horror factor that is slow to arrive, despite the short duration of the experience.

The Casting of Frank Stone may be something for die-hard Dead by Daylight fans or those who truly love Supermassive's adventure games, and can even act as a good entry point for new players, but it can't help but feel like a disappointment. While the story is great and the camera mechanic is neat, the overall experience is dragged down by the likes of repetitive, bland areas and a few aggravating characters. Still, it's great to see a franchise with a lot of variety such as Dead by Daylight expand into other genres, but let's just hope that next time they bring along a lot more personality.