Developer Supermassive Games once asked us to survive until dawn, now the interactive slasher film specialist wants us dead by daylight in The Casting of Frank Stone. This story-driven spin-off of the popular asymmetrical multiplayer sneak-and-slash-’em-up attempts to develop a backstory for the villainous source of all evil in the Dead by Daylight universe known as The Entity. However, dated, quicktime event-focused gameplay, woefully perfunctory combat, an underdeveloped cast of characters and a complete lack of scares make for a six-hour slog that’s hardly worth staying up past bedtime for.
While Dead by Daylight’s character roster has grown 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 a completely original cast of villains and potential victims. This is a major downside, as hardly any of them leave a lasting impression. Main monster Frank Stone (Miles Ley) is certainly an imposing presence in the story’s prologue, but after that he’s nowhere to be seen for any length of time. Instead, we’re treated to a truly unremarkable cast in a lukewarm story that jumps back and forth between the filming of a low-budget horror movie in an abandoned steel mill in Cedar Rapids in 1980 and a clandestine meeting of strangers in a remote English mansion in the present day.
In both time periods, the plot takes a surprisingly long time to cover short distances, and there’s little horror and very little stress amid meandering conversations between the eight playable characters. With the exception of the likable Linda (Lucy Griffiths), whose dry sarcasm occasionally provides welcome laughs and who is thankfully present in both eras, the rest of the main cast are burdened with dialogue that’s often clunkier than a Freddie Krueger piano solo and forced into relationship constructs that aren’t given enough time to develop. In particular, the love triangle between teenagers Jaime (Andrew Wheildon-Dennis), Chris (Rebecca LaChance), and Robert (Idris Debrand) feels rushed, leaving little room for believable tension between them, meaning I never really worried about my choices driving any particular character into the arms of another.
In fact, I cared so little about the fates of these partially formed players that I barely batted an eyelid when each of the main cast was turned into a bleeding man as the body count mounted in the story’s second half. This is where the cosmic power of the Entity is properly unleashed in both the present and the past, and while there were admittedly some interesting revelations to be discovered about this malevolent creature and how its evil pulls Frank Stone’s strings, the whole thing is riddled with a convoluted mix of confusing multiversal wormholes and glaring plot holes. All in all, this sloppy and fearless horror story feels less like a mandatory piece of backstory for fans and more like a long, unnecessary and unskippable cutscene that leads into any given Dead by Daylight multiplayer match.
Bad Manors
While The Casting of Frank Stone’s story is messy and not the least bit memorable, it has plenty of branching paths, and the same goes for its environments. Unfortunately, while the dingy underground tunnels beneath the Cedar Rapids steel mill and the grim, gilded hallways of Gerant Manor certainly exude plenty of atmosphere, they’re not particularly interesting or intimidating to explore. Worse, they’re reused far too often—over and over I found myself trudging past the same set pieces like I was a member of Spinal Tap desperately searching for the stage door. I spent most of my time tapping through simple buttons in cutscenes, so it felt particularly limiting that, despite occasionally having full control over a character, I so rarely got to see or do anything interesting.
There are some simple survival horror puzzles to solve, like pushing boxes or finding keys, and in one of several nods to the core Dead by Daylight experience, you’ll be faced with the occasional generator that needs to be repaired to power an elevator or door. However, while the process of repairing these simple mechanisms in Dead by Daylight devolves into heart-pounding bouts of panic as a murderous Michael Myers from Halloween heads your way, the absence of any danger of pursuit means they’re robbed of any real urgency here, and are instead just simpler quicktime events to be dutifully ticked off. It’s nice that they’ve incorporated Dead by Daylight’s skill check prompt here, but it does little to improve the actual interactions in any meaningful way.
While I never had any trouble fixing the generators, I wish someone had taken the time to fix The Casting of Frank Stone’s inability to generate terror. Aside from life-or-death decisions in cutscenes, the rare enemy encounters are otherwise trivialized by a powerful weaponized camera that goes from Super 8 to the supernatural. There’s only one entity-powered Frank Stone specter to face at a time, and all you have to do is point the camera’s viewfinder at them and press record to drain all of their life force. Their presence is always clearly marked, and as a result they never caught me off guard, nor did they get anywhere close enough to pose any form of threat – I’m not sure they’re even capable of carrying out attacks, as they effectively stayed in a comfortable wide shot in my viewfinder; never a killer 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 bath in comparison.
Dead by intent
Of course, this being a Supermassive Games adventure, some characters can and will die. But in my experience with The Casting of Frank Stone, it was either because I was eager to see them go, or because I was taking a sip of coffee and was too slow to reach for my controller during an unexpected and obviously momentous cutscene. About half of the playable characters died before the credits rolled, and while I was pleased to see some of these executions lifted straight from Dead by Daylight—like impaling a certain victim on the sharp end of a dangling hook—I can’t say that any of these unmemorable fleshbags met their sudden death in a particularly inspired or shocking way.
Once the campaign is complete, you unlock the Cutting Room Floor feature, which lets you follow any branching story path backwards and jump back to specific scenes. This lets you pick up a storyline and take 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 the possible outcomes, but I wish it was a bit more flexible—to prevent a character’s death, I had to replay six scenes leading up to the moment that decided their fate, rather than just jumping straight to that critical decision and continuing from there, which seemed annoyingly awkward.
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 cute Chuckie-sized plushies and hidden throughout each environment. This is in addition to numerous other nods to the multiplayer crime sim, like the Huntress’ rabbit mask I found on a shelf in Cedar Rapids’ curio shop. Hardcore Dead by Daylight fans will likely have fun discovering all of this, but whether it’s worth playing (let alone replaying) a fairly forgettable horror story depends on how loyal your fanbase may be.
