As a huge fan of both developer Supermassive Games’ interactive horror marathons and publisher Behaviour Interactive’s asymmetrical multiplayer Dead by Daylight, I thought The Casting of Frank Stone might have been a daydream I conjured during yet another sleepless night. Unfortunately, it’s actually a drawn-out multiverse adventure with pacing as lethargic as I am.
The Casting of Frank Stone reviewDeveloper: Supermassive GamesPublisher: Behaviour InteractivePlatform: Played on PS5Availability: Out 3rd September on PC (Steam, Epic), PS5, Xbox Series X/S
The game follows Supermassive tradition – as in the developer’s 2015 cult hit Until Dawn and 2022’s The Quarry – by focusing on a group of small-town teens and finger-wagging adults as they all discover the supernatural evil saturating their lives. Frank Stone, the game, effectively serves as an explanation for Dead by Daylight’s cyclical set up, its repetitive Killer-versus-four-Survivors trials. Though it does this peripatetically, with an original cast of characters facing an original set of circumstances.
Their story unfolds in two overlapping parts: in the 80s, a group of friends filmed a horror movie at an abandoned steel mill. In 2024, Frank Stone, the guy, is a serial killer whose screaming soul is trapped on cloudy slices of their Super 8 film. After dying at the mill decades prior, Frank was incorporated into the billowing, unexplained Entity, a cosmic spider-being Dead by Daylight players will recognize as that game’s progenitor. So layers of interdimensional sorcery are somehow responsible for this circuitous plot. In this origami timeline, you control different iterations and family members of the original friend group – the young and older versions of stoic director Linda, the grieving daughter Madison, and so on.
But, despite the interesting intricacies of its plot, The Casting of Frank Stone’s catatonic horror is hardly explored in its interactive narrative, which spends too much time on inconsequential exposition; romantic threads unroll into nothing, character revelations never resurface, and so on. You’ll have to wait for about four of the game’s approximately six hour run time to pass heavy and sedated, like elephant footsteps, before any action starts.