The Casting of Frank Stone review: Dead by Daylight spinoff struggles to execute

“Why you can trust Digital Trends – We have a 20-year history of testing, reviewing, and rating products, services and apps to help you make a sound buying decision. Find out more about how we test and score products.“

There’s safety in a horror movie. Unwitting teens may be sliced up on-screen, but the viewer always has the power of distance. If I see a trailer for a film that looks too frightening for my tastes, I can choose not to watch it. That leaves its monsters trapped in a containment cell, unable to feed off my fear. I forfeit that power the moment I sit down to watch it. The terror seeps off the screen and clings onto me. I may carry it with me for the rest of my life. Cinema isn’t just escapism for its viewers; perhaps it’s a more literal escape for its monsters too.

Supermassive Games plays with that dynamic in its latest narrative adventure, The Casting of Frank Stone. Positioned as a Dead by Daylight spinoff, the horror game tells the story of a steel mill, the killer that stalks it, and a mysterious film that intersects with his gruesome murders. It’s a tale about a horrifying incident that no one can seem to let go of, whether through reliving the trauma or preserving it on celluloid to be endlessly rewatched — or that’s at least what it’s about when it’s not struggling to thicken up another game’s thin premise.

The Casting of Frank Stone works when Supermassive Games is focused on crafting an original horror story built from the same bones as Until Dawn. Its multigenerational slasher premise gets complicated by its duties as a spinoff, throwing its titular killer and grander themes to the wayside to retroactively build lore for a separate multiplayer game. It makes for a disjointed tale that only claws at a larger point about the intersection of horror and the media about it.

Familiar horror

The Casting of Frank Stone is an interconnected narrative adventure that hops between three different decades. It begins in the 1960s, as a police officer confronts a menacing murderer wearing a welder’s mask in a steel mill. From there, it jumps to the present day, where three strangers are summoned to a manor by an art collector looking for pieces of an old B-grade horror movie called Murder Mill. The third piece, set in the 1980s, tells the story of how that film came to be. That lets Supermassive get creative with its usual structure as it crafts a complex mystery that’s revealed as the three stories weave in and out of one another.

Despite being connected to Behaviour Interactive’s Dead by Daylight, The Casting of Frank Stone is unmistakably a product of developer Supermassive Games. The studio retains its signature “interactive movie” style here, even making room to innovate on its formula. It’s only a touch shorter than its average games, which works to its advantage. Projects like The Quarry have previously suffered from overly long wind-ups en route to their bloody moments of tension. There’s less fat here, though that’s likely because The Casting of Frank Stone is more of a horror mystery than a slasher film. Long bouts of exposition feel more like missing puzzle pieces than table-setting.

The bulk of its gameplay tricks are familiar. Players guide characters through its chapters, making dialogue decisions that shape the story, completing quick-time actions, and doing a bit of occasional button mashing to lift a grate or pull a lever. There are snippets of third-person exploration in between all that, with light puzzles to solve and collectibles to find. Supermassive doesn’t overdo any of those ideas, thanks in part to the lean runtime. Every choice or failed timing challenge has a tangible impact on the story, though the time-hopping story creates some restrictions when it comes to life-or-death stakes. The fates of most of its characters often feel sealed considering where those pawns are placed in the present-day chapters.

Supermassive still finds room to have fun with its formula here. There are clever nods to Dead by Daylight in collectible Easter eggs and some specific gameplay interactions (you bet you’ll be turning on some generators here). My favorite touch is a late=game mechanic that has me using an 8mm film camera to ward off a monster, as these sequences almost call back to Fatal Frame. Referential moments like that feel like a smart fit for a game spun off from the Super Smash Bros. of horror media.

Other fan favorite features like co-op play return, but the most welcome innovation here is the Cutting Room Floor. The new menu lays out every choice that players made through their playthrough in a flowchart. They can then hop back into any branch point and choose a different decision to play the story out differently. It’s a simple addition that makes it so players no longer have to start over from scratch just to try something different. All of that is to say that if you enjoy Supermassive’s style of gameplay, The Casting of Frank Stone delivers what it does consistently — and a bit more too.

Side project

The tough part about Supermassive’s style is that it lives and dies by the story placed into the template. That’s where The Casting of Frank Stone struggles to make a name for itself while simultaneously propping up Dead by Daylight. The mystery starts on a promising note. Its opening flashback to the 1960s is its tightest horror sequence, as players creep through a dark mill and face off against Frank Stone in tense quick-time events. That’s followed by a bit of psychological horror, a campy “strangers in a mansion” premise, and a classic ’80s teen slasher setup. There are three good horror tropes in one here and the fun is in watching how those come together.

In its best moments, The Casting of Frank Stone seemingly has something to say about where real horror and invented ones intersect. Frank’s killing spree in the 1960s was a very real tragedy that scarred the small town of Cedar Hills. Twenty years later, it becomes fodder for some young adults looking to turn it into fiction for the sake of a schlocky movie. The more they try to carelessly capture Cedar Hills’ history on film, the deeper the wounds become. The horror becomes permanent, forever captured on a spool of film waiting to be unleashed on another generation.

In its early hours, it feels like Supermassive has found a way to cleverly tie into Dead by Daylight through shared themes rather than direct lore connections. The multiplayer game is famous for bringing iconic killers across film and games together to celebrate the legacy of the horror genre. The Casting of Frank Stone initially plays on that idea through its own fictional film with a life of its own. It feels like it’s building toward a meta-explanation for why Dead by Daylight’s world brings fiction to life, letting our fears break free from the media that contains them to terrorize a new generation of survivors.

That promising setup eventually takes a back seat as the story more explicitly tries to fill in Dead by Daylight’s gaps. Frank Stone himself begins to feel like an afterthought, an avatar for The Entity, the vague cosmic evil that motivates the multiplayer Dead by Daylight. If you’re not familiar with puzzle pieces like that already, The Casting of Frank Stone does little to introduce them to new players. The deeper the story gets, the more it feels like it is only there to needlessly explain the mechanics of Dead by Daylight’s cyclical multiplayer matches. By the end, I can’t help but cynically feel that the story is just a long way to introduce some new playable characters to Dead by Daylight.

The Casting of Frank Stone winds up feeling like a side project for Supermassive as a result of that tension. Even its signature Hollywood production value feels underplayed. While it still includes high-quality motion capture work and perfectly fun genre performances from the cast, it’s lacking the star power appeal of games like The Quarry (a middling slasher elevated by spirited acting from the likes of Grace Zabriskie and Ted Raimi). It’s filled with visual glitches. Muted audio design leaves sequences that should be tense feeling flat. It’s still a fun little slice of horror for those who love Supermassive’s formula, but I have to imagine that the studio is saving the big guns for Directive 8020, its stylish sci-fi game coming next year.

For those who simply want to know more about the world of Dead by Daylight, The Casting of Frank Stone serves as a concise and well-constructed lore rabbit hole. Its best moments, though, are the ones that gesture at something greater. There’s a compelling meta-commentary on horror media here, one that touches on how film imprisons our greatest fears and unlocks the cage as soon as an unsuspecting viewer thinks they’re safe enough to watch.

The Casting of Frank Stone was reviewed on a PlayStation 5.