The Casting of Frank Stone Review [IGN]

While Dead by Daylight’s character roster has swelled to include a who’s who of nightmare-haunting horror icons like Leatherface from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and even walking internet memes like Nicholas Cage, The Casting of Frank Stone features an entirely original cast of villains and potential victims. This is very much to its detriment, since barely any of them leave much in the way of a lasting impression. Main monster Frank Stone (Miles Ley) certainly strikes an imposing figure in the story’s prologue, but he’s nowhere to be found for significant stretches after that. Instead, we’re saddled with a truly unremarkable cast in a tepid tale that pinballs back and forth between the filming of a low budget horror movie in an abandoned Cedar Rapids steel mill in 1980, and a clandestine meeting of strangers in an isolated English manor in the present day.

In both time periods, the plot takes a surprisingly long time to travel short distances, with only small amounts of horror and very little stress to be found amidst meandering conversations between the playable cast of eight characters. With the exception of the likeable Linda (Lucy Griffiths), whose dry sarcasm provides some welcome laughs on occasion and who is thankfully present in both eras, the rest of the leads are saddled with dialogue that’s often clunkier than a piano solo from Freddie Krueger, and forced into relationship contrivances that aren’t given enough time to evolve. In particular, the love triangle between teenagers Jaime (Andrew Wheildon-Dennis), Chris (Rebecca LaChance), and Robert (Idris Debrand) feels rushed and leaves little space for any believable tension to develop between them, which meant that I never really agonised over steering any particular character into the arms of another with my choices.

In fact, so little did I invest in the fates of these partially-formed players that I barely batted an eyelid while each leading man was turned into a bleeding man as the bodycount built up in the story’s second half. It’s here that the Entity’s cosmic power is properly unleashed in both the present and the past, and although there were admittedly some interesting revelations to be uncovered about this malevolent creature and how its evil is pulling Frank Stone’s strings, it all gets pockmarked by a muddled mix of confusing multiversal wormholes and glaring plot holes. All told, this sloppy and scare-less horror story feels less like a mandatory bit of backstory for fans and more like one long, unnecessary and unskippable cutscene to lead into any given Dead by Daylight multiplayer match.

Bad Manors

While it may be messy and not the slightest bit memorable, The Casting of Frank Stone’s story certainly has a lot of branching paths, and so too does its environments. Unfortunately, while the dingy, subterranean tunnels beneath the Cedar Rapids steel mill and the gloomy, gilded hallways of Gerant Manor certainly ooze plenty of atmosphere, they just aren’t all that interesting or intimidating to explore. What’s worse, they’re reused far too much – over and over again I found myself plodding past the same bits of scenery like I was a member of Spinal Tap desperately searching for the stage entrance. I spent the vast majority of my time tapping through basic button prompts in cutscenes, so it felt especially limiting that when I was occasionally given full control of a character I was so rarely given anything interesting to see or do.

There are some simple survival horror puzzles to complete like pushing crates or finding keys and, in one of a number of nods to the core Dead by Daylight experience, you do get faced with the occasional generator in need of repair in order to power up a lift or door. However, whereas the process of fixing these straightforward mechanisms in Dead by Daylight is transformed into fits of heart-pounding panic since you’ve got a murderous Michael Myers from Halloween homing in on your position, here the absence of any stalking threat means they’re robbed of any real urgency and are instead just more basic quicktime events to be obediently ticked off. It’s neat that they’ve incorporated the Dead by Daylight skill check prompt here, but it does little to enhance the actual interactions in any meaningful way.

While I never struggled to repair its generators, I wish someone had taken the time to fix The Casting of Frank Stone’s inability to generate scares. Outside of life or death cutscene-based decisions, the rare enemy encounters are otherwise trivialised by a powerful weaponised camera that transforms from Super 8 to supernatural. There’s only ever one Entity-powered Frank Stone specter to face off against at a time, and all you need to do is train the camera’s viewfinder on them and hit record to sap them of all their life force. Their presence is always clearly signposted, and as a result they never got the drop on me nor did they ever get remotely close enough to pose any form of threat – I’m not sure if they’re even able to perform any attacks since they effectively stayed at a comfortable wide shot in my viewfinder; never a killer close-up. Dead by Daylight might be capable of some truly terrifying stalker escapes, but The Casting of Frank Stone is about as stressful as a spa bath in comparison.

Dead by Design

Of course, since this is a Supermassive Games adventure, some of the characters can and likely will die. But in my experience of The Casting of Frank Stone, this was either because I was perfectly happy to let them go, or because I was having a sip of coffee and was too slow to reach for my controller during an unexpected and evidently majorly consequential cutscene junction. Roughly half of the cast of playable characters perished before I rolled credits, and although I was pleased to see that some of those executions were ripped straight out of Dead by Daylight – such as the piercing of a certain victim onto the sharp end of a dangling hook – I can’t say that any of these unmemorable meatsacks met their sudden deaths in any particularly inspired or shocking ways.

Once the campaign is completed, you unlock a Cutting Room Floor feature that allows you to trace each branching story path backwards and hop back into specific scenes, allowing you to pick up a story thread and twist it in a new direction by making a different decision and seeing how things play out. It’s a nice feature if you want to experience all possible outcomes, however I wish it was a little more flexible – in order to prevent one character death I was forced to replay six scenes in the lead up to the moment that decided their fate, rather than just hopping directly to that critical decision and going from there, which seemed annoyingly cumbersome.

Still, this branching chapter select is certainly handy if you want to go back and find any Dead by Daylight-inspired collectibles, with signature killers like The Trapper and The Clown shrunken down into adorable, Chuckie-sized plushies and hidden throughout each setting. This is in addition to numerous other nods to the multiplayer murder sim, like The Huntress’ rabbit mask I found on a shelf in Cedar Rapids’ curiosity shop. Dead by Daylight diehards will likely get a kick out of discovering all of these, but whether they make it worth playing (let alone replaying) a pretty forgettable horror story depends on how fiercely loyal your fandom may be.