The Casting of Frank Stone

The Casting of Frank Stone is a dull Dead by Daylight spin-off story that’s barely worth staying up past your bedtime for.

Supermassive and Behaviour team up for a fun horror story, but not without several faults.

Supermassive Games' collaboration with Dead By Daylight developer Behaviour Interactive results in occasionally awkward fan service.

Though the developer has some horror highs in its catalog, The Casting of Frank Stone rests six feet at the bottom of it.

Those who have always wanted to know more about how Dead by Daylight’s cast of characters came to be trapped in a never-ending nightmare by The Entity will be wholly pleased to finally have some answers, especially if the DBD-stylised achievements and endless Easter eggs didn’t already have you foaming at the mouth. If you’re a fan of Dead by Daylight or The Dark Pictures Anthology, The Casting of Frank Stone is an absolutely must-play for you. Even then, those unfamiliar with the series’ will still find something to appreciate during this entertaining, albeit fleeting, experience

We generally love the marriage between story and gameplay that Supermassive Games creates, but without the many advancements of The Dark Pictures Anthology, The Casting of Frank Stone feels far too simple. With an uninteresting narrative to boot, the first effort to expand the Dead by Daylight universe is a misfire.

If you've played pretty much any Supermassive game in the past - from Until Dawn to The Quarry - you'll know what to expect from The Casting of Frank Stone. This Dead by Daylight tie-in doesn't quite match the lofty heights of those two games in particular, but it gets pretty close, delivering an engaging popcorn horror experience along the way. We'd have been well up for a few more hours in this universe, which certainly says something, but ultimately results in The Casting of Frank Stone sitting just below greatness.

Despite odd technical issues, this is another quality Supermassive Games release, though it won't stand out from the herd.

The Casting of Frank Stone makes for an exciting expansion of the Dead by Daylight universe, even if it doesn't do much to stand out from other Supermassive Games titles.

The Casting of Frank Stone works when Supermassive Games is focused on crafting an original horror story built from the same bones as Until Dawn. Its multigenerational slasher premise gets complicated by its duties as a spinoff, throwing its titular killer and grander themes to the wayside to retroactively build lore for a separate multiplayer game. It makes for a disjointed tale that only claws at a larger point about the intersection of horror and the media about it.