The Casting of Frank Stone Review – A Bloody Good Time

The Casting of Frank Stone on PC

Supermassive Games has a monopoly on the interactive horror movie genre. It’s a simple formula, but one that works well. You control a group of characters caught in a typical horror movie scenario, and you’ll make the decisions that will lead them to safety – or an early grave.

The Casting of Frank Stone marks the developer’s first crossover, with asymmetrical horror Dead by Daylight getting the honour. It’s a tough sell, but one that works well. Yes, the game works best if you know Dead by Daylight and can recognize the many, many easter eggs. I’ve been playing Dead by Daylight for years, and even now there are references I’m sure I missed or couldn’t place. However, even if you haven’t played Dead by Daylight, The Casting of Frank Stone does a great job of introducing you to the universe, and works well as a standalone story.

We’ll play it coy with the spoilers, but for those of you who don’t know Dead by Daylight, here’s the gist: an ancient primordial God, known as the entity, sucks killers and survivors into its realm to play a deadly and near-eternal game of cat and mouse. The Casting of Frank Stone is essentially the origin story of one of these killers, explaining how he was drawn into the fog as he stalked a group of young filmmakers at the steel mill he made his lair.

If you’ve played a Supermassive game before, you’ll have a fair idea of what to expect from the gameplay. You control a group of characters and explore the environment, making decisions that will affect how the story progresses. Do you take one path or another? Do you treat others kindly, or cruelly?

Where The Casting of Frank Stone takes things to the next level is in ambition. All Supermassive games reward exploration, but here it’s taken to the next level. For example, I took a detour in an early chapter and discovered a key. This key, in turn, led to an optional area where a fairly extensive puzzle led to a simple collectible.

Elsewhere, I found a piece of familiar music I could play on a nearby piano to unlock a hidden room with another collectible. Too much work for too little payoff? Perhaps, but I did feel like moments like this made me want to see everything.

Luckily, the game avoids one common mistake in exploration-focused games. It’s near-impossible to accidentally move on before you’re ready, since you’ll need to hold the action button down when talking to someone or trying to move through a door. It’s a simple solution, and one that should come as a welcome relief if you don’t want to miss anything while searching for collectibles. I never found myself dragged forward unwillingly by talking to the “wrong” person or opening the “wrong” door.

And there’s a lot to see. The Casting of Frank Stone is a beautiful game, with well-realised environments. As you explore areas you’ll find evidence of what happened to other characters there, whether it’s an abandoned hat or a conspicuously broken pipe. The Casting of Frank Stone gets a lot of mileage from relatively few locations, but it never feels detrimental to the overall experience. It puts the movie firmly in the Interactive Movie space.

The character models are a little inconsistent, however. In some cases, you can see individual wrinkles, hairs, and even pores of skin. It’s beautiful but does make it stand out if a relatively minor character doesn’t look right.

In true Supermassive fashion, death is a constant threat – and you’ll often be blindsided regardless. My first death came as the result of a simple choice just as events kicked into high gear, and there are dozens of moments like this. For some, you’ll have a chance to fix your mistake. Elsewhere, as with my tragic first death, it’s as simple as making the wrong move.

Dead by Daylight fans can expect plenty of easter eggs, ranging from the obvious to the obscure. Explore an antique shop and you might find a killer’s mask, or one of their add-ons. Expect to see the entity pop up occasionally, or to hear familiar sound effects or musical stings. At a few points in the game you even have to fix generators to progress. Moments like this help make the game feel distinctively Dead by Daylight, but this is very much a Supermassive game at the same time. It’s a delicate balance, but one I enjoyed. Often, a licensed game tries too hard to appease existing fans, and the result is a game that pleases nobody – or as we not so affectionately call it Lost: Via Domus syndrome. That’s not the case here.

This is a game that plays it safe. If you’ve played Supermassive games before, you can expect to have your expectations subverted. It’s not a game that’s beholden to how things have been done before, it’s a game that isn’t afraid to take new approaches. This is good, because Supermassive has previously been accused of sticking too close to the established formula, most notably with the first two games in the Dark Pictures Anthology sharing the same basic twist. This is a game that highlights how far Supermassive has come, and how it’s matured.

A game like this thrives if you care about the characters, and I was pleased to see that the characters were all wonderful. Of course, you’ll have your favorites (for me it was insecure actor Jaime, filmmaker Linda, and grieving daughter Madi, none of whom I managed to save on my first playthrough), but you still understand who they are on a deep level. You might not necessarily like everyone, but at the very least you care what happens to them.

There are also plenty of great quality-of-life additions that would perfectly fit into other interactive movies in the future. Among these is the Cutting Room Floor, which lets you effortlessly see your decisions and how they affect each other, and go back to change them if you want.

This feature lets you see every possible chain of events, so you can see every branch – if not necessarily what to do from then on. Even better, you can easily see which chapters hold collectibles that you missed. It’s not a perfect system, however. You can’t view it in-game, so you have to exit to the main menu to see which collectibles you’ve missed. You also can’t travel to every point in the game, so if you want to redo a specific decision, you might need to replay a few minutes beforehand. It’s definitely a system that needs a little refinement, but it’s a big step up from where we were before.

Additionally, there’s Plunderer’s Instinct, which unlocks once you’ve completed the game. This lets you instantly see any trinkets you’ve missed, which makes it perfect for searching for collectibles. It’s another simple addition, and one that’s perfect if you want to see everything.

And of course, there’s Frank. Ah, Frank. If you’re a Dead by Daylight fan who came into this game thinking he felt a tad similar to The Trapper, you’ll be happy to hear that Frank is a different beast entirely. By turns tragic and terrifying, he’s an amazing villain, and one who brings his own power to the Dead by Daylight omniverse.

It’s almost a surprise how long it takes for him to appear in the flesh after your first encounter, but your patience is rewarded with one of the most horrific creatures in the history of either Dead by Daylight or Supermassive games, and that’s saying something. We won’t spoil things by going into detail about his motivations or methods, but longtime Dead by Daylight fans will be heartened to see such deep exploration into the world – while newcomers might just be tempted to see what the fuss is all about. It’s only a matter of time before Frank makes his way onto Dead by Daylight, and we can’t wait for it.

Now for the negatives – and despite our glowing review so far, there are negatives. The collectibles have an odd habit of turning up out of order, so expect to find Trinket #5 while you’re still looking for #4. It didn’t ruin my experience, but it did lead to me thoroughly searching areas because I was certain I’d missed something.

One of the many types of decision you’ll make will be how to respond in conversations, but occasionally I found that both answers available were unnecessarily hostile. While you can occasionally unlock new options in some conversations by finding the right objects, I was disappointed if I wanted to play a character as a nice guy or foster a good relationship, and my only options boiled down to “aggressively dismiss” or “hesitantly accuse.” This didn’t ruin the game for me, but it did disappoint me just a little.

There was also a slight problem with responsiveness at times. Occasionally you’ll need to cross a beam (which you do, in classic “drama over sanity” fashion, by walking instead of crawling) and when this happens you’ll often need to approach it a few times before the input appears. Again, it’s not a huge issue, but it is an issue. Elsewhere, you’ll need to repair a few generators throughout the game, and it felt to us that our entry was delayed just a little – not a huge deal, but enough that you may miss a few skill checks.

I also found a small issue with the collectibles. There are three different kinds to collect, and in some cases you’ll collect these out of order. It’s not a game breaking issue, but it did lead to moments of confusion as I looked around for something I’d find in a later chapter. It would have made more sense to have the collectibles available in the order they were picked up. There are two in the same set which are mutually exclusive, demanding multiple playthroughs to collect them both. The trinkets – replicas of several killer add-ons – can only be seen if you find one of the toolboxes littered around the map, rather than being able to view them in the menu.

Most annoyingly perhaps are the third collectibles, artifacts. These are letters or items split into three categories giving more hints about the storyline or characters. The annoying thing is you can’t read them in your menu, only see what the characters noted about them. In one case, a character picked up a letter in a cut scene, read it in a different cut scene, and had the option to confront another character about the contents – contents I didn’t see, as I didn’t get a chance to read it for myself.

I was also a little disappointed that, in some cases, different characters can go through the same action sequences depending on your decisions. While this is a great idea in theory, in practise this is simply a case of replacing the models. Both characters will face the same skill checks to do the same thing in the same places. It would have been nice to see, say, Linda and Madi take a slightly different path while being chased, rather than follow the same paths right down to making the same mistakes and even making identical arm movements.

Another issue with the characters is that some of them seemingly disappear from relevance as the game continues. It’s made clear who the main characters are, and there were occasions when characters would disappear for large periods of time. Even when we saved characters on subsequent playthroughs, it was common for them to take on a supporting role.

Finally, there’s length. The Casting of Frank Stone has a lot of chapters, but many of them are short. In fact, some only last a single cut scene or setpiece. It’s not quite as short as Man of Medan or Little Hope, but not as long as The Quarry, either. Unfortunately, the game does take a while to really ramp up, and it feels like it’s over fairly quickly afterwards. However, there’s plenty of replay value, and we’re willing to concede that had we not accidentally lost some of the characters at the first available opportunity, we may have seen more of the game on our first time around. Despite the relatively slow build-up, the action is worth the wait, even if Frank can be a tad easy to escape at times.

Overall, though, this is a game we loved, and among the best (if not the best) Supermassive games ever made, and one that’s sure to please both established fans of Dead by Daylight and those who’ve never heard of it. It’s a difficult balancing act, and one that The Casting of Frank Stone makes look easy.