3/5 ★ – LCSnoogs's review of The Casting of Frank Stone™.
I found this game to be baffling. It's called The Casting of Frank Stone, and Frank Stone is barely in it. He's killed in the opening of the game. It's not a slasher story. It's supernatural horror. Which is disappointing because the thing that's actually killing characters for most of the game doesn't have an interesting look or any kind of personality.
As for the story, I like the setup. It's split between two time periods: 1980 and present day. The 1980 story follows a group a teens trying to make a film at the local steel mill where Frank Stone killed his victims. This is a fun, meta idea. In the present day, a group of strangers are called to a manor by a mysterious woman who wants to buy their copies of the film the teens made in 1980. This film is apparently notorious for causing audiences to lose their minds and attack each other. Both storylines build up mystery for one another. It works well until the ending that I couldn't make sense of. This might be because I've never played Dead by Daylight. I came to this game as a Supermassive fan. This might've been a mistake. The finale was pretty anticlimactic and unsatisfying. There was also a late death scene I couldn't make sense of either, and it really annoyed me.
The gameplay is nothing special. It plays like other Supermassive games. The new mechanic here is the skill check. It's a familiar mini game where a marker moves around in a circle, and I have to hit the "A" button as the mark enters a highlighted area. It's easy to mess up if you are not paying attention forcing me to always be paying attention to what's going on and stay calm. It works here. The other noticeable gameplay idea is fixing generators. For some reason, this same gameplay concept popped up three times during the game. The characters will find something that needs power. They find the generator that supplies the power, but the generator is missing parts. I have to walk around the room to find the missing parts and put them back into the generator. I wish they got more creative and varied with these obstacles.
Overall, the game was disappointing. It's not the worst Supermassive choice and consequence game, but it's nothing special. Maybe Dead by Daylight fans will get something more out of this than me.