Even a quick glance at the promotional material for The Casting of Frank Stone will tell you that this is a story “from the world of Dead by Daylight.” This is most evident on the game’s own title screen, where the franchise’s name is prominently displayed in boldface font, just like the game’s actual title.
But don’t get me wrong, regardless of the IP being released, The Casting of Frank Stone is a supermassive game from start to finish. How you feel about playing it will probably be influenced more by how much you enjoy the studio’s horror-flavored adventure style than by whether you’re a fan of Behaviour Interactive’s all-consuming horror IP toybox of asymmetrical online multiplayer.
I’m in the fortunate position of being a fan of both DBD and Supermassive, and am particularly obsessed with the latter’s extensive catalog of interactive movie-style horror games, so naturally this game feeds me. And while this may be primarily a game for Supermassive fans, even DBD lore aficionados won’t want to miss this one just because it plays differently from the main game.
Manage cookie settings
This isn’t the first time Dead by Daylight has tried its hand at spinoff ideas and turned to the experts. Back in 2022, Hooked on You: A Dead by Daylight Dating Simulator was released with the backing of Psyop, a team best known for creating a full-fledged game with surprisingly high production values and a KFC dating sim that wasn’t an April Fool’s joke. Despite its silly premise — or, to be fair, perhaps because of it — Hooked on You was approached with all the seriousness of a team that knew exactly how to execute their chosen genre.
So naturally, for a Dead by Daylight adventure game rich in story and lore, Behaviour Interactive turned to Supermassive Games, the studio behind the iconic interactive horror drama Until Dawn and its spiritual successor The Quarry, and The Dark Pictures Anthology, to do what they do best and bring the concept to life.
Supermassive’s QTE-driven gameplay integrates very well with Dead by Daylight’s signature skill checks, so DBD enthusiasts who have never experienced an interactive adventure like this before won’t feel completely out of place. But while The Casting of Frank Stone promises both single-player and multiplayer options, it’s more about story-driven investigation and decision-based optional co-op that will have you teaming up with all your friends as you aim to help the protagonist survive, not stealthily repair generators around a shabby arena while one of you horribly murders the rest of them.
The entire game follows the Supermassive tradition of featuring multiple character perspectives, but the only playable character in the single-player demo I previewed is Sam Green, a 1970s police officer, and he’s not one of the young dudes promised as the main playable group. Sam is the kind of calm, rational African-American cop that modern media relies on to evoke audience sympathy when the plot demands a police officer as the main character, and as you can imagine, he’s got it covered. But I wouldn’t recommend getting too attached to him or Tom, since this seems like a prequel to the game itself. Tom is a night shift security guard who spreads a conspiracy in the spooky old steel mill that’s the game’s central setting, and he’ll presumably serve as Player 2’s avatar in co-op mode. Supermassive chief protagonists generally have the kind of life expectancy that might make you mourn Mayfly.
If there’s one major stylistic departure from Supermassive’s usual tone that marks it out as a Dead by Daylight story, it’s the literal viscera on display. Supermassive doesn’t exactly shy away from gore, but nonetheless, the most memorable scene from this preview is the one where Sam spends a surprisingly long time dipping his hand in the organic filth that he encounters with Tom while they’re searching the steel mill grounds for a missing child. Sam doesn’t hesitate to put his hand in there up to his wrist before confirming that it’s human remains, and it quickly devolves into some classic Supermassive hilarious—and perhaps intentional—conversation as he and Tom calmly discuss what the heck this sticky red stuff with ribs sticking out of it is.
The weird transition into such surreal absurdity fits particularly well with the tone of the Dead by Daylight games. Seeing Frank Stone’s casting literally putting a small baby in tangible danger within the first hour tells you they’re serious, but it feels like it should be a slightly more serious introduction to the franchise than Stranger Things’ Lara Croft and Steve being menaced by a crazy K-Pop idol.
The occasional tonal oddity aside, The Casting of Frank Stone features a suitably creepy setting. Sure, an empty steel mill in the middle of the night can be a bit cliché, but it’s the perfect setting for combining Supermassive’s signature riffs on classic horror with the gritty industrial vibes of Dead by Daylight. Supermassive have been honing their craft for years at this point, so it’s no surprise that they nailed both the central setting and the broader atmosphere of Cedar Hills, a rural Oregon town that’s a community dominated by the inescapable prominence of its central industry.
There’s a sublime twin peaks and silent hill influence to be felt, aided by some excellent sound design work that cranks the horror up a notch, especially during Sam’s descent into the impressive steel mill’s basement. For the record, I — a horror genre veteran — played this demo in a bright room in the middle of the afternoon on one of the brightest, hottest days of August, and I still got goosebumps from the distant squeaks of metal and the unintelligible running around.
By the end of this 45-minute demo, I still wasn’t convinced that The Casting of Frank Stone was going to be a Dead by Daylight story. At one point, a character is shoved over a steel pipe that pierces his shoulder in a deliberately overt reference to DBD’s iconic meat hook spear, and the teaser at the end of the preview left me convinced that it was all a matter of plot details that would be revealed in due course. But there wasn’t much else that really set it apart from Supermassive’s other narrative horror games so far.
Whether or not this is a drawback depends on why you want to play The Casting of Frank Stone, of course. Longtime Supermassive fans like myself will be happy to get more of what we love after an unusually long period of silence from the studio, which recently strayed from its regular annual release schedule and hasn’t released a new game in 18 months. But Dead by Daylight fans who are diving into interactive storytelling for the first time, expecting lots of lore details, may have to be patient as the developers have resisted the urge to stuff every scene with Easter eggs.
But there’s a silver lining here, because Supermassive’s take on building upon the lore of the DBD universe seems far more nuanced than that. A given value of “subtlety” includes a giant alien beast with sinister tentacles rising from the fog. Whether this is a key backstory for The Entity’s arrival on this plane of reality, or a standalone snippet of lore before the monster known as Frank Stone is inevitably added to DBD’s roster of killers remains to be seen. Fortunately, you don’t have to be a diehard Dead by Daylight fan to appreciate what Supermassive has constructed here; all you need is an appreciation for atmospheric horror stories.
