REVIEW – A plus for Dead by Daylight fans, and for everyone else, an experience that’s definitely worth a try. Anyone who has enjoyed Telltale’s games will certainly enjoy The Casting of Frank Stone, and Supermassive Games has wrung a pretty exciting adventure out of it, although… not sure it will be available for many to replay.

The Casting of Frank Stone is also supposed to introduce players to the world of Dead By Daylight. It may be able to fulfill this task to some extent, so it’s justified to lower the rating by a few thousand characters.

Augustine Liber’s fatal flaw

Augustine Liber was the unfortunate woman who unleashed the ghost of Frank Stone. Frank was a murderer, and it’s probably not a spoiler to reveal that he was killed at the beginning of the game. Then a group of teenagers with a weird camera were able to capture the ghost (Ghostbusters!). Fast forward four decades to the present, and lo and behold, a group of strangers are invited by Augustine to his castle. Each has a little snippet from a strange movie. It sounds a bit like a B-movie, but that’s the charm of The Casting of Frank Stone, because that’s exactly the style it uses. There are characters you want to see dead on purpose. It has a humor that can be a little scary. The story is good because it outlines the story of Dead by Daylight, but it’s a bit disjointed. It often jumps between past and present timelines, and the problem is that some of the ideas and decisions don’t really go anywhere in the end. While the franchise it feeds off of can be described as a bit chaotic, it slips through here, but not in a good way. Otherwise, the Supermassive style is very much in evidence.

Creepy environments, easy puzzles, and most of all an emphasis on communication between the characters. The relationship between them depends on the choices they make, but often it seems that the logical choices make the relationships worse. For example, questioning Augustine’s intentions. Doesn’t anyone feel suspicious? The other interesting thing is the design of the game. It didn’t really feel like exploration could give you a step advantage in the dialog, so it had an unnecessary effect in relation to it, or at least it felt a bit rushed. And it was a little weird when you would find references or objects from Dead by Daylight in the area during dialogue, and then the character you were talking to would pick up right where they left off. The last time this happened was in Poker Night 2, and that was a Telltale game (well, a scripted poker game rather than an episodic adventure, but the characters were talking at the table). So there was no useful sense of discovery, and it felt a bit unusual (or unnatural?). Still, there are some surprisingly strong moments in the game.

Frank is too easy to stop

There will be several moments in The Casting of Frank Stone where characters are stuck in a room. You have to focus a camera on Frank to temporarily push him away so that you can continue your exploration or find the generator parts. If this had been at least a little more exciting, it would have been effective, but it’s a little illusion- and mood-destroying how easy it is to stop because you don’t even have to resort to crawling. There are, of course, QTEs that pop up towards the end, even combined with the scenes (and time to fix the generators, as bizarre as that sounds), and then Frank will chase you through the castle in a supremely distorted way. This is cool in the game, and the experience would have been even better if the crawling-climbing had been more serious.

The game took just under five hours to complete, and the ending was really the best part. There are really split-second decisions to be made, and if we make the wrong one, we’ll probably be killed by Frank in a heap. We should have focused on that experience and atmosphere, and then we could have had a really good game. And the main menu had Die Alone and Die Together. The latter is where 2-5 players can pass controllers to each other, so there’s the co-op that Supermassive’s other games have. They could have left it out here, though, since the character jumps around a lot… but since there are five of us playing together in Dead By Daylight, maybe that’s why they decided to use it.

Frank Stone survived

Technically, the game was a bit flawed, with some animations and models being choppy and stuck, a bug in the ending (a character that didn’t fit), and a few typos. For these reasons, it deserves no more than a harmless seven. Fair enough, but it could have been better. For fans of Dead by Daylight, The Casting of Frank Stone is worth an 8/10, because for them it’s a great addition to what Behaviour Interactive has to offer in the main franchise…

-V-

Publisher: Behavior Interactive

Developer: Supermassive Games

Style: interactive drama

Release: September 3, 2024.