When I started writing up my shortlist of 2024 GOTY candidates earlier this autumn – in an attempt to sort through a messy mixture of widely-agreed-upon hits I still needed to play and total heart picks I intended to go to bat for – The Casting of Frank Stone easily cleared my personal top 10, quite clearly in the latter category.
Admittedly, this game was never going to be a hard sell in my case. As far as I’m concerned, the horror output of Supermassive Games only comes in three flavours: “good”, “great”, and “amazing”. Literally the only truly bad time I’ve ever had with one of their games was during the denouement of Little Hope, and even then, I got over it pretty quickly.
And, while my actual playtime in Dead by Daylight is definitely eclipsed by the hours I’ve spent obsessively digging into the lore surrounding it, I think that’s still sufficient to call myself a fan. So a Dead by Daylight story mode-style spin-off developed by Supermassive was, for me, the definition of a no-brainer.
I didn’t go in expecting anything earth-shattering – just the promise of a Dead by Daylight story in the style of The Dark Pictures Anthology was already more than enough to win me over. But while Frank Stone somewhat predictably failed to set the world on fire when it released on September 3rd (meaning that we share a birthday, coincidentally, although I promise that’s only made me a little biased in its favour), I was still pleasantly surprised by how much I rated it. It might be in my all-time Supermassive top three, honestly.
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The Casting of Frank Stone is both intriguing and grim. Charting the intertwined fates of five playable protagonists across three different time periods – all connected by a historic series of killings in the town of Cedar Hills, Oregon, and the subsequent release of a no-budget student film inspired by the case – just theorising as to what’s really going on is enough to keep you on your toes for much of the game. It’s got atmosphere in spades, and a decent amount of variety in its choose-your-own-adventure gameplay, but at its heart this is 100% one for the lore nerds, alright.
Probably to its biggest detriment is the fact that The Casting of Frank Stone ends on a brutal narrative gut-punch that will only land if you’re at least passingly familiar with the wider worldbuilding of Dead by Daylight. I don’t think that this is a failure of the game, which I believe achieved exactly what it set out to do, and delivered a story that would hook fans of its parent series (pun absolutely intended). But when I think about how it came out and then went away again with relatively little fanfare, I suspect that this might be a big part as to why.
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Nevertheless, in an entertainment industry increasingly dominated by cynical brand tie-ins between the biggest wallets on the one hand, and brutal copyright takedowns smothering small artists in petty disputes on the other, I don’t mind telling you that I for one want to see more collaborations like The Casting of Frank Stone: just a couple of studios taking an opportunity to meet organically at the intersection of their specialities, to see what shenanigans result from the mashup. That sort of co-operation coming out of artistic compatibility ahead of financial incentive feels so rare that it’s practically retro in and of itself.
So, even if The Casting of Frank Stone wasn’t for everyone, I’d love to see more games adopt its pattern going forward. And if your two favourite games just happen to be, say, Dead by Daylight and Until Dawn, then there’s a good chance that it actually could be your tailor-made GOTY after all – truthfully, it came rather close to being mine.
