The Casting of Frank Stone™

I came to The Casting of Frank Stone mostly curious about what Supermassive could do inside a universe built for sweaty asymmetric multiplayer. Turns out the answer is: build a reasonably competent cinematic horror game and wallpaper every corner of it with Dead by Daylight fan service. That is both its strongest pitch and its most honest limitation. The structure spans three timelines, a 1963 police investigation at a Cedar Hills steel mill, a 1980 teen-filmmakers-in-a-haunted-mill scenario that makes up the meat of the experience, and a 2024 stretch set inside a European manor owned by a cultist named Augustine Lieber. The way the game weaves these together using the Entity's dimension-bending mythology is genuinely clever, and the idea of trapping your characters at the iconic Dead by Daylight campfire as the finale is a nice payoff if you know the source material. If you don't know DbD at all, the story still holds up as a standalone slasher origin, though some of the connective tissue reads thin. The character writing in the 1980 section is where Supermassive earns their reputation. Each of the teenage filmmakers feels distinct, dialogue choices carry actual weight across scenes, and the branching decisions are the kind that quietly pay off much later rather than immediately announcing their consequences. On the gameplay side, this is firmly in the interactive-drama camp that Supermassive has been refining since Until Dawn. You walk, you explore, you hit dialogue prompts, and occasionally you hit a quick-time event styled after Dead by Daylight's own skill-check mechanic, which is a satisfying piece of mechanical crossover. The 8MM camera is the one original tool on offer: point it at supernatural threats to dispel them, first-person, no traditional QTE noise. It is novel but low-pressure, reloading instantly and facing enemies with all the urgency of a park stroller. The puzzles are light. The collectible system, including tiny Rellik figures representing DbD killers, rewards exploration without demanding it. Post-completion, a Cutting Room Floor feature lets you jump into any scene and replay alternate paths, and a collectible-finder mode removes the tedious re-tread grind. Both are genuinely welcome quality-of-life additions that other games in the genre should copy. The problems are the usual Supermassive problems. Movement is slightly janky, invisible walls pop up in tight spaces, and launch-window reports flagged graphical pop-in and lip-sync issues that patches have partly addressed. The final act has been criticised across multiple outlets for feeling rushed, and some save-file corruption reports on Xbox at launch were bad enough to scare off completionists from replaying. At around six hours for a first run, the game is short even by the standards of this genre, and the QTE density is lighter than The Quarry or Until Dawn, which means the tension spikes less often. The multiplayer mode, where each player around a couch controls one character, exists but the online co-op some players expected is absent, and that absence genuinely hurts the game's group-night appeal. The verdict on who this is for is actually pretty clear. Dead by Daylight players who have always wanted the lore served up properly, the Entity, the generators, the campfire, the killer dioramas, will get more out of this than anyone else. Supermassive fans who loved The Dark Pictures Anthology will feel at home but may feel the formula is running on familiarity rather than invention. If you have never touched DbD and have no attachment to cinematic horror games, this is a tough recommend at full price for six hours of content. Everyone else, wait for a sale and bring someone to share the couch.

Fred · Scout Team

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