‘The Casting of Frank Stone’ Review: A Multiverse of Madness for ‘Dead by Daylight’ Fans

As evidenced by The Casting of Frank Stone, which is set in the world of Behaviour Interactive’s Dead By Daylight, Supermassive Games has perfected the art of interactive horror schlock. The British video game developer has essentially become an interactive EC Comics for the “elevated horror” generation, with imaginative storytelling choices, ace leftfield casting, and accessible but elegant choice-driven gameplay in service of stories that’d be right at home on the front page of Shudder on any given day.

Supermassive’s latest is an intricate Stephen King-style time-jumping tale. In the 1960s, a cop named Sam Green investigating a missing child case winds up taking down the titular serial killer at a steel mill. In 1980, a group of suburban kids winds up going to that steel mill to film a low-budget horror movie, and quickly discover that Frank Stone may not be as dead as previously thought. Finally, in 2024, one of those kids, having grown up into a popular horror director, gets invited to a gothic mansion in the middle of the night by a suspicious rich woman who appears to be collecting every copy of the low-budget film, along with stories about how audiences who view the film wind up committing inexplicable acts of violence.

On paper, that sounds far more literary than Frank Stone’s pedigree would suggest, but this isn’t Alan Wake 2. The story being told is pretty simple, falling back on more than a few teenagers-in-peril slasher-flick tropes in its ’80s-set section, and rather elegantly backdooring the narrative into giving the Dead by Daylight 4v1 setup a cool lore-based reason for being.

As for the 2024-set section, it’s a mild disappointment only in that it introduces an In the Mouth of Madness-style hook that could actually lead somewhere smarter and scarier—positing that all of Dead by Daylight’s connections to horror history have even creepier connotations—but never goes there. By and large, though, given the task of turning Dead by Daylight’s grim but splintered lore into a full-fledged game, Supermassive has still executed another excellent bit of popcorn-slasher fare, and made good on a lot of Dead by Daylight’s narrative promises over the years in the process, with the sole caveat that this is still very much a Supermassive game.

What that means is that the interactivity of this interactive narrative is fairly sparse, largely left to a few branching dialogue choices that largely govern tone rather than splintering events that change the fates of all the characters involved. Compared to how bloodthirsty both Supermassive games and Dead by Daylight can be, it takes a while for a body count to start up, and when it does, the first couple are alternate reality mulligans neutralized by the twists in the narrative. There’s a mechanic halfway through the game that introduces a Fatal Frame-like camera system into the mix, but it’s a minigame rather than a weapon against a terrifying threat.

That leaves the character work to build up a compelling story, Frank Stone’s core cast of kids is incredibly likable. All of them have big dreams of leaving their hometown for various reasons, but only one—uncanny Chloë Sevigny doppelganger Linda—ever gets to realize them, and her dreams come with a terrifying caveat. As for the ancillary adult characters, they vary in terms of likability, but they all coalesce into an oddball ensemble worth fretting about as they take on unknowable horrors. Maybe the greatest, simplest compliment that can be paid to Supermassive’s work here is that after years of only watching and reading about the game from the sidelines, Frank Stone made me want to start playing more Dead by Daylight.

This game was reviewed with a key provided by Behavior Interactive.