Frank Stone Cast Review

Developer Supermassive Games once challenged us to survive until dawn, and now the interactive slasher specialist wants us to die before dawn in The Casting of Frank Stone. This story-driven spin-off of the popular asymmetric multiplayer sneak-and-slash ’em up attempts to flesh out the story of the sinister source of all evil in the Dead by Daylight universe, known as The Entity. But aging, quick-time gameplay, woefully superficial combat, an underdeveloped cast of characters, and a complete lack of scares make it a six-hour grind that’s barely worth staying up late for.

While Dead by Daylight’s roster of characters has expanded to include horror icons haunting nightmares like Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and even walking internet memes like Nicholas Cage, Frank Stone’s cast features an entirely original cast of villains and potential victims. This is a huge disadvantage, as almost none of them leave a lasting impression. The main monster, Frank Stone (Miles Ley), certainly makes an impressive impression in the story’s prologue, but he’s nowhere to be found for quite some time. Instead, we’re saddled with a truly average cast in a tepid tale that teeters between a low-budget horror film set in an abandoned Cedar Rapids steel mill in the 1980s and a secret meeting of strangers in an isolated English manor house in the present day.

Evil Manors

While it may be chaotic and not at all memorable, The Casting of Frank Stone’s story certainly has a lot of ramifications, as does its setting. Unfortunately, while the grim, underground tunnels beneath the Cedar Rapids steel mill and the grim, gilded corridors of Gerant Manor certainly exude plenty of atmosphere, they simply aren’t all that interesting or terrifying to explore. Worse, they’re overused too often – I found myself trudging past the same bits of scenery time and again, as if I were a member of Spinal Tap, desperately searching for a way into the scene. I spent most of my time clicking basic buttons in cutscenes, so it felt especially limited when I was occasionally given full control over my character, so rarely was there anything interesting to see or do.

There are some simple survival horror puzzles to solve, such as pushing crates or finding keys, and in one of the many nods to the main Dead by Daylight experience, you’ll occasionally come face to face with a generator that needs repairing to power an elevator or door. However, while the process of repairing these simple mechanics in Dead by Daylight devolves into heart-pounding panic attacks as you have a murderous Michael Myers from Halloween heading your way, here the lack of any threat from pursuers means that they’re devoid of any real urgency and are instead just more basic quicktime events that need to be dutifully ticked off. It’s cool that they’ve included a Dead by Daylight skill check prompt here, but it doesn’t do much to enhance the actual interactions in any meaningful way.

While I never had any trouble fixing the generators, I wish someone would take the time to fix The Casting of Frank Stone’s inability to generate scares. Outside of the life-or-death decisions based on cutscenes, the rare enemy encounters are otherwise trivialized by the powerfully weaponized camera that switches from Super 8 to supernatural. There’s only ever one spectral Frank Stone powered by the Entity to deal with at a time, and all you have to do is point the camera’s viewfinder at him and hit the record button to drain all of his life force. Their presence is always clearly marked, and as a result, they never startled me or got close enough to pose any threat—I’m not sure they were capable of performing any attacks, since they effectively kept themselves in a comfortable wide shot in my viewfinder; it was never a deadly close-up. Dead by Daylight may be capable of truly terrifying stalker escapes, but The Casting of Frank Stone is about as stressful as a spa bath by comparison.

Dead by design

Of course, this being a Supermassive Games adventure, some characters can and probably will die. But in my experience with The Casting of Frank Stone, it was either because I was perfectly happy to let them go, or because I was taking a sip of coffee and too slow to reach for the controller during an unexpected and apparently very important cutscene intersection. About half the cast of playable characters died before I rolled the credits, and while I was pleased to see some of those executions ripped straight from Dead by Daylight — such as impaling a certain victim with the sharp end of a hanging hook — I can’t say that any of these unforgettable sacks of meat met their sudden demise in any particularly inspiring or shocking way.

Once you complete the campaign, you unlock the Cutting Room Floor feature, which lets you retrace each branching story path back and jump back to specific scenes, allowing you to pick up the story thread and twist it in a new direction by making a different decision and seeing how things play out. It’s a cool feature if you want to experience all the possible outcomes, but I wish it were a little more flexible – in order to prevent one character from dying, I was forced to replay six scenes in the run-up to the moment that decided their fate, rather than simply jumping straight to that critical decision and moving on, which felt annoyingly tedious.

Still, this branching chapter selection is certainly useful if you want to go back and find any Dead by Daylight-inspired collectibles, with iconic killers like the Trapper and the Clown shrunk down to adorable Chuckie-sized plushies and hidden all over the place. That’s on top of numerous other nods to the multiplayer murder sim, like the Huntress’s rabbit mask I found on a shelf in a Cedar Rapids curio shop. Die-hard Dead by Daylight fans will likely enjoy discovering them all, but whether it’s worth playing (let alone replaying) a fairly forgotten horror story depends on how loyal your fans are.

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