Frank Stone Casting is the ultimate narrative adventure game for fans of the Dead By Daylight series, or for those who have grown tired of Supermassive Games’ horror efforts. As Supermassive’s past projects – Until Dawn, The Quarry, The Dark Anthology – have shown us, it puts its influences out there and isn’t afraid to have fun.
It’s a short and fun farce that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and while I think those unfamiliar with Dead by Daylight might miss its best moments, the casting of Frank Stone shows that Supermassive Games is, constantly The land keeps getting stronger and stronger.
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Now is the time for Behavior Interactive to decide to expand on Dead by Daylight’s lore – beyond the Hooked On You: Dead by Daylight dating simulator we received in 2022 – and I’m happy to see Behavior choose Supermassive Games for development who.
For any horror fan, this is a match made in heaven. If any studio wanted to delve into the nature of the entity, its horrific lore, and the survivors and killers it trapped within its realm, it would be on a massive scale, and the developer certainly didn’t skimp on gore and content. stingy. The developers made sure you squirmed in your seat, not just by making sure you could accidentally kill your favorite characters with ease. Yes, that’s what I do. Not just once.
Bloody horror, Supermassive’s QTE-filled, dialogue-driven gameplay pairs perfectly with Dead by Daylight’s gameplay loop. It wouldn’t be a true Dead by Daylight game without a generator or two to repair and those pesky skill checks, and fans were not disappointed. There are a lot of nods, some explicit, some not, to Dead by Daylight, as well as Supermassive’s own past projects. Ultimately, fans of either developer can get heavily invested and excited here.
The game begins in a run-down factory, where Officer Sam Green is sent to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a teenage boy, and ends up discovering much more than he bargained for. Throughout the prologue, the tone of your typical teenage slasher is immediately set; you quickly resist the urge to scream at the screen and tell Sam Green to turn around and go home. After all, who discovered a rotting corpse and a dismembered ear and thought, “Hey, let’s no Call for support and let’s keep moving forward, literally.” It is here that we first meet the eponymous Frank Stone and the mysterious figure Augustine Lieber; two characters who are crucial to the chilling story that is about to unfold.
After a short but exciting prologue, you get to the real meat of the game, which is told in different time periods. You first meet people like Maddy, Linda and Stan, who are all summoned to Geraint Manor – a rather spooky manor that feels like it was pulled out of The Woman in Black – — comes to strike a deal; a deal involving never-before-seen footage from the seventies film “Murder Mill” being handed over to its disturbing owner.
That’s where our throwback begins, as you return to the filming location of Cedar Hill’s Murder Mill, with young Linda and her companions – Robert, Jamie and Chris – at the helm. When the group decided to visit the factory shortly after Frank Stone’s horrific actions and film some of the final scenes there, it’s no surprise that this group of nosy teens got themselves into trouble. As they do, our present-day characters find themselves in trouble.
At times, the flashbacks and cinematic sequences feel very Alan Wake-esque, and Frank Stone’s casting seems fully aware of this. After all, Deadline by Daylight has been a game that celebrates all things horror for nearly a decade, so for a single-player adventure like this to have that same influence – including ones that are reminiscent of PT, Deadly Frame etc. moment – it feels incredibly easy.
Instances like these combined with Dead by Daylight’s abundance of Easter eggs ultimately make Frank Stone Casting more than just an expansion of Dead by Daylight’s base story. Instead, it feels like a celebration of the passion for horror, and those with any love for DBD will especially appreciate all the relics and homages to the past that can be found by more curious players.
At this point I can’t neglect to mention the dialogue either. It’s often awkward and silly, and it did break my immersion at times, but at no point did it feel out of place in this horror movie. Supermassive isn’t making a B-movie, that’s for sure, but it shows time and time again that it knows how to replicate movies with quality and style. These ambitious cinematic adventures from Supermassive often harken back to the horror films of the seventies and eighties, and in that sense, The Casting of Frank Stone is no exception.
This silly, out-of-place dialogue works wonders and makes the game both fun and terrifying. I find this very important when trying to convince non-horror fans to play these games with me. This kind of dark, twisted humor paired with moments of horror is what I’ve come to expect from Supermassive Games and Behavior Interactive, and the developer has once again shown that it understands the psyche of its audience and sets the tone of the story on multiple levels.
The best and worst moments of Frank Stone’s casting came in the finale; which I felt came too soon. It’s safe to say that I expected a lot more from the game’s ending sequence, although I did kill off a few characters on my initial run (accidentally!) and can imagine the ending if I’d laid it out differently. could have completely different fates for them. That said, what fans of Dead By Daylight will really rejoice in is the Frank Stone Casting finale; it’s both disturbing and funny, providing a fitting end to a series of characters while providing some of the best moments we’ve seen in the series. The people you meet in Deadline by Daylight set the stage.
Those who’ve been wanting to know more about how Dead by Daylight’s characters came to be trapped in a never-ending nightmare by entities will be delighted to finally get some answers, especially if the DBD-style achievements and endless Easter eggs don’t already exist Makes you foam at the mouth. If you’re a fan of Deadline by Daylight or The Dark Pictures Anthology, Frank Stone Casting is an absolute must-play. Even so, those unfamiliar with the series will still find something to appreciate in this fun but short-lived experience
Frank Stone Casting is available now on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. The game was reviewed on PC using code provided by the publisher.
