Dead by Daylight’s tangled, ever-growing lore full of eldritch god-like beings and licensed killers was bound to grow beyond the confines of an asymmetrical multiplayer game. Reading codex entries in between sweaty matches packed with teabagging randos is just not the most conducive environment for effective storytelling. It’s a rich playground to dive into, one that Supermassive Games’ narrative adventure title, The Casting of Frank Stone, is more equipped to handle. Heralding this niche genre for the last decade hasn’t worked in the team’s favor, though.
The Casting of Frank Stone demonstrates this ineptitude in ways not too dissimilar from Supermassive Games’ previous games. While a brilliantly detailed experience with stunning environments, character models, and lighting (the lack of a photo mode is keenly felt), the facade crumbles when it starts to move. The cast often stares blankly or gesticulates unnaturally in ways that would surely fail the Voight-Kampff test. Robotic behavior like this shatters immersion and makes it more difficult to get invested.
The inconsistent animation undersells the story, which has enough of its own issues. And while that implies sweeping mistakes with the script or terrible dialogue, mediocrity is more the culprit here. Despite solid performances, the banter among the crew is merely serviceable, yet never that charming or poignant. The broad swaths of the plot usually aren’t too hard to follow, but a lot of the details are obtuse or conveniently justified through the supernatural. Some beats have subtle nods to Dead by Daylight, while others are either explained in the archives buried deep within that multiplayer title or badly conveyed here. The final stretch benefits from fantastic monster design and a smooth transition to its source material, but the chapters that lead up to it are marred by inelegant narrative design that’s too shallow to tell a meaningful story or, at the very least, one this lore deserves.
The Casting of Frank Stone's Gameplay Style Is A Bit Tired
The Casting of Frank Stone tries to use branching paths to distract players from its narrative shortcomings, but that’s still not an all-healing salve. The allure of having multiple roads to take is quickly undone because of how limited and hollow these choices are, even if the handy new Cutting Room Floor feature lets players continue on from any unlocked branch to see new scenes without the fear of overwriting a save. Dictating where the plot swerves via big, binary prompts or quicktime events are not a new or interesting way to influence events in an interactive medium, especially when leaned on this heavily for this long.
The Casting of Frank Stone’s inventory system, like The Devil in Me’s, is essentially a superfluous flourish, since it just carries the most immediate key item and doesn’t require any management or critical thinking. This also has the knockdown effect of ensuring that its few puzzles are overly simplified. Exploration doesn’t often yield more than a collectible or note, either, so wandering off the most direct route to the objective likely won’t lead to a different path or better outcome.
The Casting of Frank Stone Has Some Shooting... Technically
There are a handful of sections, however, that try to meld gameplay and story, and these parts are where the game shows promise. Players are given a camera to aim at the monster and must film it until it explodes. There are no quicktime events or noisy prompts; it’s just up to the player and their ability to aim and shoot.
Success isn’t exactly hard-earned, since reloading film is instantaneous and the beast has the agility of a sloth, but it’s a small step in the right direction. The Casting of Frank Stone is not scary because players are so often disconnected from the threats and safe during a vast majority of its exploration segments. It also doesn’t even have cheap jump scares, as Supermassive has thankfully moved away from them in recent years after leaning too heavily on them. But these makeshift shooting segments still have a thin layer of tension and demonstrate what the studio could do if it tried to push out of the small box it has kept itself in for so long.
The Casting of Frank Stone includes a few minute improvements over Supermassive Games' approach, like its handful of quicktime event-free gameplay segments and clearer look at the branching paths. But it's still just the same formula with the same pitfalls that have regularly plagued this studio’s near-annual releases in the genre. Middling writing, frequently uncanny animations, and a lack of scares make The Casting of Frank Stone another passable entry in the interactive horror/suspense genre.
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 68 /100 Critics Rec: 38%
- Released
- September 3, 2024
- ESRB
- M For Mature 17+ // Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language
- Developer(s)
- Supermassive Games
- Publisher(s)
- Behaviour Interactive
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 5
WHERE TO PLAY
- Platform(s)
- PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S
- Genre(s)
- Adventure
- Beautiful environments that are coated in realistic lighting and shadows
- Frequently shaky animation breaks immersion
- Gameplay is too tame and follows Supermassive?s many other games too closely
- Story is sometimes confusing and doesn?t live up to its potential
The Casting of Frank Stone launches September 3, 2024 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S. The Best War Games was provided with a PS5 code for this review.