A quick glance at the promotional materials for Frank Stone Casting reveals that this is a story “from the world of Dead by Daylight.” Nowhere is this more apparent than on the title screen of the game itself, where the series’ name is as large and prominent as the game’s actual name.
But no matter which IP it’s released under, there’s no doubt about it: Frank Stone’s Casting is a massive game from start to finish. How you feel about playing it will probably depend more on how much you like the studio’s style of horror adventure games than on whether you like Behaviour Interactive’s horror IP toy box – an asymmetrical online multiplayer game.
I’m lucky enough to be a fan of both DBD and Supermassive, and I’m particularly fond of the latter’s already extensive catalog of interactive cinematic horror games, so naturally I was very pleased with this game. While this game may be mainly aimed at Supermassive fans, fans of DBD lore won’t ignore it just because it plays differently from the main game.
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This isn’t the first time that Dead by Daylight has considered making a spinoff and called in experts to make it. Back in 2022, Hooked on You: A Dead by Daylight Dating Simulator was made by Psyop, the team best known for making the KFC dating sim that somehow became a full game with surprisingly high production values rather than an April Fools’ tweet. Despite its silly premise – or, to be more blunt, probably because of it – Hooked on You was made with the seriousness of a team that knows exactly how to handle their chosen genre.
So when it came time to create a story-rich, lore-heavy Dead by Daylight adventure, it was only natural that Behaviour Interactive turned to the expertise of Supermassive Games – the studio behind the iconic interactive horror Until Dawn and its spiritual sequels Quarry and The Dark Pictures Anthology – to bring the concept to life.
Supermassive’s QTE-oriented gameplay blends perfectly with Dead by Daylight’s signature skill checks, so DBD fans who’ve never experienced such an interactive adventure won’t be completely at a loss. But while The Casting of Frank Stone does promise single-player and multiplayer options, it’s the story-driven investigation and optional decision-based co-op mode where you’re on the same side with all of your friends, aiming to help the protagonist survive, rather than running around a grimy arena to secretly fix a generator while one of you tries to brutally kill the others.
The entire game will follow the Supermassive tradition of being told from multiple characters’ perspectives, but in the single-player demo I previewed, the only playable character was 1970s-era policeman Sam Green, who might not be the young friend of one of the promised main playable groups. Sam is the kind of cool, reasonable African-American cop that modern media relies on to earn audience sympathy, and who gets away with it when the plot calls for a cop as a protagonist, you know what. But since this appears to be the game’s official prologue, it’s probably best not to get too attached to him or Tom—the conspiracy-theorizing night-shift security guard at the spooky old steel mill in the game’s central setting, who might serve as Player 2’s avatar in co-op play—because the longevity of Supermassive prologue protagonists is often breathtaking.
If there’s one thing about Supermassive that deviates from the usual style and clearly marks it as a Dead by Daylight story, it’s the viscera on display. Supermassive doesn’t shy away from gore, but despite that, I felt the most memorable scene in the trailer was the one where Sam spends a long time sticking his hand into a pile of organic matter that he and Tom discover while searching for missing children at the steel mill. Sam doesn’t hesitate to stick his hand into the stuff, even before confirming it’s human remains, and the scene quickly devolves into classic Supermassive dialogue that’s funnier than it’s meant to be as he and Tom calmly argue over what exactly this gooey red stuff with ribs sticking out of it is.
These oddly surreal antics are particularly suited to the style of the Dead by Daylight games, though I feel like the casting of Frank Stone – who puts an actual baby in clear danger within the first hour, so you know they mean business – should have been a slightly more serious entry in the series, rather than Stranger Things’ Laura and Steve being menaced by a deranged K-pop idol.
Aside from the occasional eerie note, though, the setting of Frank Stone’s Casting is pretty spooky. Sure, an empty steel mill in the dead of night can be a little cheesy, but it’s a perfect setting that marries Supermassive’s signature classic horror elements with the grimy industrial vibe of Dead by Daylight. Supermassive has spent years honing their craft, so it’s no surprise that they’ve managed to nail both the core setting and the wider atmosphere of the rural Oregon town of Cedar Hill, a community clearly dominated by the inescapable importance of its core industry.
As Sam delves deeper into the bowels of the grand steel mill, you can feel the vintage influences of Twin Peaks and Silent Hill, especially some excellent sound design work that heightens the sense of terror to an excruciating degree. Incidentally, I—a veteran of the horror genre—played the demo in a brightly lit room in the afternoon of one of the brightest and hottest days of August, and I still shuddered at every distant clang and unidentifiable rush.
By the end of this 45-minute or so demo, I admit I’m still not entirely sure what makes Frank Stone’s Casting a Dead by Daylight story. At one point, a character is shoved onto a steel pipe that pierces his shoulder in a deliberately thinly veiled reference to Dead by Daylight’s signature meathook stabbing, and the hint at the end of the preview has me fully convinced that this is all a matter of plot details that will be revealed in due course. But so far, what I’ve seen doesn’t feel too different from Supermassive’s other narrative horror games.
Whether this is a drawback or not depends on why you want to play Frank Stone’s Casting, of course. Super-old-timers like myself will be happy to get more of what they love after an unusually long hiatus from the studio, which recently paused its normal annual release schedule and hasn’t released a new game in 18 months. But Dead by Daylight fans trying interactive storytelling for the first time, hoping for a ton of lore detail, may need to remain patient as the developers resist the urge to cram Easter eggs into every scene.
But there’s a silver lining, because Supermassive’s approach to building the lore of the DBD universe seems a lot more subtle than that – and for a given “subtle” value, that includes a giant alien beast whose ferocious tendrils loom out of the mist. Whether this means we’ll get some crucial backstory about the entity’s arrival in this plane of reality, or a standalone lore piece about a weirdo named Frank Stone before he’s inevitably added to DBD’s roster of killers remains to be seen. Fortunately, you don’t need to be a Dead by Daylight superfan to understand what Supermassive is doing here – just an appreciation for the atmosphere of a horror story.
