Skylar Savarin

“The Casting of Frank Stone” is the latest interactive horror game from developers Supermassive Games, who are more well-known for the cult classic “Until Dawn.” Another notable thing about this game is that it is a spinoff of the popular multiplayer horror game “Dead by Daylight” (“DbD”) — set in the same universe while also being its own standalone story. The game follows a group of young filmmakers in the year 1980 as they sneak into a condemned murder mill to shoot a horror movie. However, things go wrong when a threat of cosmic proportions starts to wreak havoc, threatening to destroy reality as we know it.
This is an admittedly interesting setup for a great game, but “Frank Stone” ends up being one of the worst games I’ve played this year. There is definitely an interesting story on paper, and it also benefits from its sense of reverence towards “DbD.”

Unfortunately, all of this is undermined by bland characters, shockingly awful dialogue and even worse voice acting — possibly serving as the lowest point of Supermassive’s catalog.

Supermassive is a developer that I have been following since 2015’s “Until Dawn,” which is still one of my favorite games in spite of its cringe dialogue and dated facial animation. While their following projects have failed to recapture the magic, thanks to wonky writing and an overall lack of innovation to the original formula, I’m always curious to see what they do next. As of right now, their only other games that I have enjoyed are “The Quarry” and “House of Ashes,” the latter of which is the third entry of their ongoing series “The Dark Pictures Anthology” (while I haven’t played it, I have heard that the fourth and most recent entry “The Devil In Me” is the best of the series to date).

My interest in “The Casting of Frank Stone” was also helped by my love for “DbD,” which I started playing recently and have been playing weekly with some of my friends. There’s a lot of interesting mythology behind the game’s killers, survivors and cosmic antagonist, known as The Entity, so a spinoff set within the world of “DbD” sounded (and still sounds) like an interesting idea, and I have hope that we can eventually get a good one — as “Frank Stone” has set the bar pretty low.

When it comes to positives, I can at least say that “The Casting of Frank Stone” contains the elements of a good story. There’s a solid setup, decent ending and despite the fact that none of this game’s elements come together to make a good narrative, there is at least an effort. I also mostly enjoy the game’s references to “DbD,” even if they eventually feel like fan-service.

Unfortunately, that’s about all I can say in terms of positives, as this game has a significant amount of issues that stop it from being something that I would recommend paying for. For starters, the game is incredibly short at only about five hours. While I recognize that like with Supermassive’s previous work the player is supposed to play the game multiple times and try to get every single ending, there is little-to-no replay value in “The Casting of Frank Stone”; as far as I’m concerned, I bought a game that I’ve spent five hours on and will never play again.

In a weird way, the short length was almost a blessing in disguise, as the writing and performances are some of the worst that I have experienced in any single one of Supermassive’s games. Don’t get me wrong, none of these games have the best dialogue or voice acting, but I at least liked the overall narrative and characters in “Until Dawn” and “The Quarry” — not to mention that both games have excellent casts that include Hayden Panettiere (“Heroes”), Rami Malek (“Mr. Robot”), Brenda Song (“The Social Network”), Justice Smith (“I Saw the TV Glow”) and David Arquette (“Scream” franchise), just to name a few.

However, I didn’t care about a single character in “Frank Stone,” mainly due to the awful writing and some of the worst voice acting I’ve heard in years. Every single character is either boring or genuinely irritating, and the problem is that the game is actually trying to make the player like some of these characters. The teenage characters in the 1980s timeline are particularly grating, especially with teenage Director Chris intentionally taking body parts from Frank Stone’s victims to film and put in her movie — and if that wasn’t enough, she never gets called out for doing something so insensitive. Thankfully, she’s the only crappy character who isn’t meant to be crappy, but she is also unfortunately a significant one as well, not to mention that her voice actress didn’t do a particularly good job either.

All of these come together to make a game that is genuinely just a slog to get through. The gameplay feels clunky, the graphics are uncanny, the music is just decent and the game is full of bugs, but all of those would have honestly been a bit less of a criticism if the story, dialogue and voice acting were better. As it stands, this game really made me feel stupid for even hoping it would be good. Despite having hints of a good story, “The Casting of Frank Stone” ultimately fails as an entertaining Supermassive game and as a “Dead by Daylight” spinoff.

RATING: 4.5/10