With the Dark Pictures series not set to return until 2025 with Directive 8020, and it having been nearly two years since Season One’s finale The Devil in Me, we were getting a little antsy for Supermassive’s brand of narrative horror experiences. Announced back in March this year, The Casting of Frank Stone sought to allay our needs with a new spin off title, this time based around the world of popular multiplayer title Dead by Daylight. While we never really got into that game, we had high hopes that Supermassive could work their usual magic and give us good reason to be invested – and they’ve only gone and done it again, haven’t they?
We’ve had a blast playing The Casting of Frank Stone these past few evenings. It takes everything we enjoy about Supermassive’s offerings – well performed characters, a strong narrative hook, stunning presentation, plenty of tough decisions to make – and only improves on them here. Fans of DbD will no doubt find more than a few easter eggs and references (including in the collectible items) but even without knowledge of the series this is still one of their better works yet.
The premise revolves around the titular Frank Stone, a serial killer on the loose in a mid-Americas town of Cedar Hills. Working at the local steel mill in the 1960’s, he’s able to kill and dispose of multiple victims before officer Sam Green stumbles across him attempting to kill one final victim – a baby in a handbasket.
Even in this opening scene, we can already affect not just the immediate outcome (save the baby/get Green out of harm’s way/trust the mill security guard (or not in all cases)) but certain aspects that will play out as we progress through the story. We’ve played it through twice now, and the differences in both stories ranged from subtle to outright opposite; who lived, who died, who trusted us, and so on.
After the opening, we spend time with two groups of characters that we won’t go into much detail about in order to preserve the story other than to say that both sets are very well developed and performed. Stand outs for us include the aforementioned Sam Green, filmmaker Linda, Madison, and the annoying-yet-likable Chris.
Second Opinion:
Special Guest Pete
I haven’t disliked any of the Supermassive games I’ve played and The Casting of Frank Stone is no different. Longer paced like The Quarry and based in the Dead by Daylight universe, The Casting of Frank Stone is another brilliant entry to add to Supermassive’s ever impressive roster of games. All characters are well written and voice acted and all the usual clues and trinkets are there to be collected and searched for. There are a few quality of life improvements,such as not having to worry about exploring and interacting with the wrong item as you can now tell which item will lead to the next cutscene and move our progress forward. The Cutting Room Floor feature adds a new layer for players to explore once unlocked (People who purchase the deluxe edition have this from the off). The ability to see how much of a butterfly effect your decision may have had and be able to choose a different route makes the replayability of The Casting of Frank Stone very high. There were a few visual glitches and I was worried at one point that I would lose a lot of progress as a few of the characters blocked the exit and wouldn’t move but thankfully I was able to resolve it. In summary, if you’re into this type of game then you won’t be disappointed!
All is – of course – not what it seems though, and we end up in a tangled web of conspiracy, cursed films, twisted loyalties, and much more. There have been a few times in past Supermassive games that a twist or revelation could feel out of place or rushed, but in The Casting of Frank Stone we’ve enjoyed the ride both times. The nature of these choose your own adventure style titles can make some scenes work less well than others, but from our playthroughs we felt everything we saw made a cohesive whole even when the outcomes were vastly different.
Gameplay will be familiar to players of previous Dark Pictures games. We spend a lot of time watching cutscenes, hands on the pad in case of sudden QTE’s or dialogue choices. When the latter pops up, we get a few seconds to choose between two replies. Again, Supermassive do a great job here of representing what we can do, with only a few options that didn’t quite have the immediate outcome we were aiming for. Obviously, we need to consider possible later swerves too, and Supermassive pay off a good amount of things that come back to bite us in the ass.
QTE’s come in two flavours here. One the more traditional mash a button before the time runs out, whereas the second will be familiar to DbD players – the Skill Check. An audio cue will play, then a cursor appears as it rotates around a circle. There’s a sweet spot and a general spot to hit A to stop the cursor, but it’s random on how quickly we need to do so. One of my characters met a grisly end because I fluffed one of these, and even on a second play I only barely caught a few of them. It certainly adds to the tension, and because they can come out of nowhere, we need to keep our guard up at all times. They can feel slightly ‘delayed’ at points, the visual representation coming up a fraction later than we’d expect, but for the most part it was my slower reactions that cost me.
Other than these moments, we get to do a light bit of exploration. There are collectibles items to find, and a few puzzles to solve to unlock certain areas (both key and optional). One nice touch is that Supermassive now note when we’re about to progress the story beyond a point that we can return, as shown by the need to hold the interact button rather than simply press it. It takes out some of the risk of accidentally moving on before we’ve finished exploring a location, and is a welcome change.
Another welcome touch is the Cutting Room Floor feature. A game such as this includes branching paths, multiple endings, and lots of scenes that are impossible to see depending on our choices made. In Dark Pictures titles, it generally resorted to guesswork (or Asking Jeeves) to figure out how to get new scenes/results. Now, we can simply scroll through the timeline, with each of the 14 chapters broken down into key moments. We can see which choices we’ve made in our current playthrough, those we’ve done in prior ones, and those we’ve yet to find. Some of the chapters offer a pretty broad range of options, and while it doesn’t outright tell us what to do to get to the locked scenes, it does at least give us a hint. It also shows a few other handy bits of info such as scenes that have collectibles in them (and whether we’ve found them), and even which locked scenes are going to result in a death. Standard edition players unlock this after one game completion, but those with the deluxe edition can access this from the off – though it’s not much use until we’ve completed it anyway.
Co-op play has been a big reason myself and Special Guest Pete have enjoyed the Dark Pictures titles, though sadly this is limited to offline, local pass the pad in The Casting of Frank Stone. This was a similar disappointment when we played The Quarry, and we hope it’ll return for Directive 8020 next year. It’s not a huge deal breaker, but we’d have loved to see it featured in The Casting of Frank Stone.
Other than this, we’re very pleased with the end result of The Casting of Frank Stone. It brings Supermassive’s talent in horror-based choose your own adventuring, and weaves in the Dead by Daylight IP well enough that we’re actually looking at playing that game again to see if we can get our hooks into it with a bit more of an understanding of the lore and setting. Two playthroughs in a few days don’t happen if you’re not enjoying the game, and while we still hold Man of Medan aloft as our favourite of the last few years, The Casting of Frank Stone easily ranks highly in our eyes as one of the best of the studio’s output.
Conclusion
Excellent presentation, storytelling, performances, and some great quality of life touches make The Casting of Frank Stone one of our favourite Supermassive Games releases yet.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
