1.5/5 ★ – TheCriticalPandaBoi's review of The Casting of Frank Stone™.

So I beat The Casting of Frank Stone, the newest Supermassive Games horror choice based game, this time as the title suggests, it takes place in the world of Dead by Daylight, and if you guys know me, then you’ll know that I’m a fan of Dead by Daylight and I’ve got more hours into that game than I’d care to admit. Since I’ve played a bunch of Dead by Daylight, to the point where I have a prestige 100 Alan Wake and a prestige 100 Steve Harrington, I thought that as a clear fan who really liked the game, I should check this game out and holy smokes, I thought this was shockingly terrible and I was not enjoying it at all. First things that I do wanna mention is that I’m not well rounded on the whole lore of Dead by Daylight, I know enough to understand what the game is doing and trying to expand on but like I really can’t say it does that well at all. I do wanna talk positive about the game first because there are some nice things that I enjoyed, as a fan of the previous Supermassive Games like Until Dawn, and as a fan of Dead by Daylight. The first thing I wanna mention that if you are a fan of Dead by Daylight then there are a lot of references and Easter Eggs for you to enjoy and find, some are very blatantly obvious even if you haven’t played the game but then there are some that are very clever and i thought served a purpose in the actual game. A lot of the blatant things were things that felt like they had no real meaning or value to the narrative of the game and were just there to do the Leonardo DiCaprio meme and point at the TV when you realise there’s a reference that you recognise. Personally, I preferred the littler details in stuff like the score that is like this vamped up version on the menu music of DBD, there’s sound queues where you pick up items that are entirely ripped out from DBD and the thing I enjoyed the most that i thought was a really good idea, the QTE’s, or the Quick Time Events are the skill checks when you repair a generator in Dead by Daylight, that was the smallest detail but a detail I did appreciate while playing through the game myself. It also affects the gameplay as well by breaking the formula of the standard QTE’s that I’ve seen countless times again in their games, and I’m glad that it feels very fateful to the game it’s placed it’s world in while also spicing it up from repetitive gameplay that I never realised I wanted. There’s other little gameplay details that I guess are passable? Like these games have never really been regarded very much on the gameplay aspect since it’s just a very standard control scheme, since the whole idea of it is to just play a movie pretty much. Graphics wise, I don’t think it looks too bad, it’s nowhere near how good The Quarry looks graphically, or even that new Until Dawn remake that’s coming out next month, I’d say the way it looks is very similar to The Dark Pictures Anthology games? At least when we’re talking about environments and how they look and feel designed, it feels like just another instalment from The Dark Pictures games. The motion capture and the facial expressions and animations looked solid though, no complaints on any of the character designs at all, especially on… Madison 😮‍💨😍, they all seem very expressive and show emotion for the moments where they need it. But that’s about where my compliments end overall, the rest of this game just feels like such a waste of a concept. The plan here is very much clear that they wanna expand more on the lore and talk about The Entity for Dead by Daylight, but like I don’t think it does that job very well since it’s lore that I’ve already heard get theorised and basically confirmed. To explain the lore real quick to anyone who isn’t well rounded in Dead by Daylight’s lore or who has not played the game, there is this entity that essentially grabs people who she perceives is worthy to play in her trials and endlessly suffer this constant loop of never ending torment, but it’s not just random people she grabs, she grabs whoever she thinks is worthy enough to enter her realm. There’s this massive multiverse lore and time travel lore that has been getting fleshed out on for awhile now, hints why you see killers like Chucky and Michael Myers in the main game, and most recently, Castlevania, which is a different universe as well as being taken place in 1476, so I’d expect this game to expand a little bit more on how The Entity works and it just gave us information that we already fucking knew. I guess the one piece of lore that was explained was something that doesn’t even take place in the actual games, nor does it have anything to do with The Entity in anyway shape or form, it’s just shit that this game decided to make up with characters it’s decided to make up, at least that’s what I think, if Madison is in the lore somewhere then someone give her my phone number please. I’m fine if they wanna expand more on different alternate timelines and dimensions, and it’s clear they pulled from the one this game brings us too with the All Things Wicked chapter and showing us teasers for the Murder Mill movie that this game expands on, but it’s really poorly put together. There’s 2 different segments of the game, the segments that take place in 2024 and segments that take place in 1981 I believe, and the 2024 segments, we get to this massive manor that we do not leave or exit until the last 5 minutes of the game. Sometimes the 1981 segments had a bit more exploration and more to do with at least the first hour of it having you kinda explore some areas but once that hours up and you’ve entered the Steel Mill then you are just in this constant repetitive nature of exploring this Mill that feels way smaller than it actually is, and it’s very tedious to go around and explore. This has been my complaints that I have had on The Dark Pictures Anthology games, a lot of the exploration feels dull and lifeless and you really don’t feel like you can get immersed into it’s world, the only exception was Little Hope and I don’t even wanna say that due to how terrible it’s ending was, so the fact they’ve decided to do the exact same thing that they’ve repeatedly done in the previous games, I tend to get a little annoyed by it, but to cut the game some slack there are definitely more exploration aspects compared to The Devil In Me and House Of Ashes, and ESPECIALLY Man of Medan. And then we get to the characters, a majority of them are either unlikeable or i just don’t care about them since they feel very one note, the only characters I truly liked were Bonnie and Sam, who were voiced and motion captured by Díana Bermudez and Tobi Bakare. The rest are just really piss poor written, which has been another complaint I’ve had about these games for a long time now as well, the writing is insufferable, especially in the dialogue, this game has some of the most laughably bad dialogue that I’ve heard out of all of their games so far. It’s just a lot of cringe dialogue that is most of the time trying to take itself so seriously but it just comes across as really funny to me, when there’s the occasional joke, I think of the stage name joke towards the beginning of the game, it just comes across more cringy than charming. There’s even some lines of dialogue that are delivered so poorly by the actor to where I thought they were either intoxicated while they were recording their lines, it felt so strange, when you get into the Machine Shop area, that’s when you’ll notice it from the Robert character. All of their games have had some bad dialogue writing but sometimes it just comes across as charming, like Until Dawn for example which is still easily the best game they’ve made, and none of their games have even came close to matching how good Until Dawn was. The writing in the story is also just kinda all over the place as well, that’s what happens when you decide to have your story take place in two separate time periods, let alone have it be a choice based game. Speaking on the choice based aspect, there’s so many choices here that doesn’t mean fuck all towards the game, there’s obviously sometimes moments where you can get your character killed and change the outcome of your ending but if I’m genuinely being honest, by the time I got to the end of the game, I was just trying to get them killed, because I really didn’t care all that much for the characters since I accidentally killed Sam and Bonnie. I also accidentally killed Stan but that death was just so funny I won’t even lie, I was screen sharing this with my friend and we were both in stitches laughing at it, it was pure comedy gold. Before I wrap up my thoughts, let’s talk about the antagonists of this game, Augustine and Frank Stone. Augustine is a very underwhelming villain that we’ve seen countless times, they have a motive, we don’t know that motive until our piss poor protagonists discover the secrets of the Krabby Patty Secret Formula and then she has her fucking Agatha All Along twist reveal and you get the idea, she’s just not memorable, the more memorable Augustine villain in gaming is the one from InFAMOUS Second Son in my opinion. And Frank Stone, when I tell you that he’s only a physical threat in the prologue of the game and the last 15 minutes, i genuinely wish I was the exaggerating, this game being titled “The Casting of Frank Stone”, your particular character that is centred around is barely in the game, we spent more time hearing and learning about him than we actually seen of him. There’s so many problems with the character of Frank Stone that’s genuinely gonna take forever to rant about everything they got wrong with him, he’s just one of those killers that have a generic backstory, his lore is uninteresting and when he finally comes back, he’s just underwhelming as all hell, literally zero emotion was on my face when he appeared because i simply didn’t care. The only times i can remember smiling and laughing is at the poorly written dialogue and the goofy character deaths. By the end of the game, I had 1 character left alive, and it wasn’t exactly on purpose either, I was just going with the motions, picking whichever decision and hope I get closer to the end of the game because i just really wasn’t enjoying the game at all. Here’s the thing, even though I’m a fan of Dead by Daylight, and I’ve been playing the game pretty much ever since I bought it back in 2018, I’m not gonna glaze this game and sugarcoat when i don’t like something that comes out of it, I’ve been very vocal with some friends I’ve played DBD with that this year, I very much have not been enjoying anything it has to offer since Alan Wake released, with the occasional spike of interest here and there. I’m not like those Fog Whisperers or those streamers who play the game on Twitch and YouTube and Facebook (if there’s even an audience on there) who will endlessly defend the game even when I don’t like something, so I treated this review like I would any other game. So I don’t need people chatting more shit to me saying “oh but you’re clearly not a fan of Dead by Daylight if you’re this harsh on a new game they released”, I’m just simply expressing my opinions and my opinion is that I don’t like this game. Overall, The Casting of Frank Stone is a terrible attempt on bring the world of Dead by Daylight into a different genre of game and try to make a more linear piece of storytelling, even though sometimes the references are charming and clever, they aren’t enough to make me like this game, it’s probably the weakest Supermassive Game that’s out currently, and I genuinely hope they start improving.