The Casting of Frank Stone could be Supermassive’s scariest game yet
Out next month, The Casting of Frank Stone is something a little different for Supermassive Games. It’s not an original IP: it’s based in the world of Dead By Daylight. But if you’re not all familiar with Behaviour Interactive’s multiplayer horror game, don’t let that put you off. The Casting of Frank Stone still very much has the DNA of a Supermassive production — and it’s shaping up to be rather good.
Supermassive Games is the studio behind the PlayStation-exclusive hit, Until Dawn. It’s also responsible for bringing us The Dark Pictures Anthology along with werewolf summer camp romp, The Quarry. While these games have all had different publishers (Sony, Bandai Namco and 2K, respectively) they all have many similarities to one another. They all focus heavily on narrative, and have multiple endings, with your own decisions and actions shaping the fate of characters.
The Casting of Frank Stone is no different. After getting our hands on a demo of the opening section of the game, it’s left us absolutely hungry for more. Seriously dark in tone and not afraid of being overtly gory, there’s every chance it could be Supermassive Games’ scariest title yet. But we’ve only seen a snippet, and there’s plenty more to come.
The demo we had our hands on cast us as a police officer on the search for a missing boy. His search took him to a steel mill, and while the security guard was adamant nothing was going on, the police officer wanted to take a look for himself. Wandering inside the vast complex and searching its many buildings soon revealed a pile of body parts: clearly, something terrible has been going on here. And it’s only when he ventured into the grizzly bowels of the mill that he found the hideout of the titular Frank Stone. Needless to say, coming face-to-face with the masked, bloodied killer didn’t go all that well.
The full game will see you taking control of a group of friends and, just like The Dark Pictures Anthology and The Quarry, you’ll be able to play in multiplayer, passing the controller around you as you each take control of your choice of characters. We didn’t get to experience that in The Casting of Frank Stone’s demo, but playing in single player is plenty tense enough.
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We were faced with numerous quick time events, along with choices to make over how we might respond in conversation. While the effects of our actions and decisions aren’t always immediately obvious, we know from playing previous Supermassive titles that most things do matter. Like the flapping of the wings of a butterfly, one seemingly innocuous choice you made early on could ultimately spell out your demise later on.
The quick time events, though? Well, the results of them are often on display immediately. We failed to press a button at the right time, which led to our police officer getting a nasty cut on his hand. Luckily, we managed to be successful in the rest of them, but had we slipped up, we’d have likely seen Frank Stone dispose of him in some gruesome manner.
Playing the demo on PC, we were blown away with how realistic and detailed The Casting of Frank Stone looks. Supermassive has always been at the top of its game in terms of visuals but we’d go out on a limb to say this is its nicest looking game yet, with character models looking more human than ever, and environments being more realistic and eerie thanks to very clever use of light and shadow.
Do you need to have played Dead by Daylight to enjoy The Casting of Frank Stone? Absolutely not. In fact, Behaviour and Supermassive Games are positioning this as a way to get more players interested in the Dead by Daylight universe.
Talking to Epic Games back in June, Behaviour’s head of partnerships, Mathieu Côté, said, “Something super important, at least for us — one of the objectives in this — is to reach the people who are familiar with Dead By Daylight but not necessarily active players.” Following on from that, Supermassive’s director Steve Goss explained, “we wanted to make sure someone who didn’t understand Dead by Daylight, or perhaps likes the idea of Dead By Daylight but didn’t want to play a multiplayer game.”
Frank Stone is, in fact, a new character, unique to Supermassive’s game. And The Casting of Frank Stone doesn’t even take place in the direct universe of Dead by Daylight: it merely expands the surrounding lore of the world. Sure, if you’ve played Dead by Daylight, we’ve no doubt there are going to be little nods to the game that you can enjoy. But if you know nothing about the asymmetric multiplayer, you won’t be getting a lesser experience because of it. If you’re a fan of Supermassive Games’ style, you’re going to find yourself right at home here.
Launching on 3rd September, The Casting of Frank Stone is shaping up to be a real treat for horror fans. It’s coming to PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC, and digital pre-orders are open now. We might have only played a short demo, but we’re rather confident in saying you won’t want to miss this — we can’t wait to get stuck into more.
