The Casting of Frank Stone Review (Xbox Series X|S)

Creepy abandoned sawmills, labyrinth-like basements, imposing stately homes in the English countryside, small-town teens trying to keep their hormones in check. Aye, The Casting of Frank Stone isn't exactly original, but Supermassive Games has delivered yet another popcorn horror experience that we can't say we didn't enjoy blasting through over the course of a couple of gaming nights.

Set in the Dead by Daylight 'universe' but forgoing any of that game's crossover material, The Casting of Frank Stone feels fairly similar to any other Supermassive horror game (The Quarry, The Dark Pictures, etc). You do have some links to the ever-popular Behaviour Interactive title — such as a worrying amount of generators to fix and some matching theme music — but players who aren't overly familiar with DBD (like us) won't really be missing out. You control a small cast of characters, make questionable choices about their fates, and eventually end up trying to run away from a big bad boss dude. It's all here and we enjoyed most of it, even with limited knowledge of the source material.

The basic setup is this: a group of teens are attempting to film their own low-budget horror movie, and they're desperate to do it within the grounds of a local sawmill. That sawmill happens to have witnessed some scary sh*t over the years, and it now harbours strange, otherworldly energy. The film goes on to be cursed, as it is in other dimensions - and you'll perform some universe-hopping moves to try and figure it all out.

If a bit tropey, this premise does enough to carry Frank Stone over its roughly six-hour runtime. There are loads of short, bite-sized chapters here that cross over multiple timelines, and although confusing at certain moments, we were always engaged with the story that Supermassive was trying to tell. As it turns out, we quite like making bad choices as digital teens; getting some of them absolutely butchered in the process.

Gameplay-wise, Frank Stone is again quite familiar, although this one does play mostly from a traditional over-the-shoulder perspective, rather than some of the less-conventional camera angles used in other Supermassive games. We liked this move — it made us feel more connected to the action — and that action mostly consists of exploration, very light puzzle solving and the odd bit of quick-time-event gameplay here and there. The Casting of Frank Stone ultimately plays like an interactive horror movie, but you will have to keep your wits about you for the next QTE or exploration segment.

On standard difficulty, The Casting of Frank Stone isn't exactly a challenging affair, but that's not really the point of these games. It's all about who you can flirt with, fall out with, and cause an untimely death with over the course of your adventure, and Frank Stone delivered on this as per usual for this dev team. We actually managed to save everyone we wanted to this time out - and we even made sure some dudebro got sliced in two because we didn't like his attitude. That's how it goes, fella.

While enjoyable as a short and sweet horror experience, then, we did have one or two issues with The Casting of Frank Stone. This game in particular, more than we've experienced in the studio's past, felt really short - with a rather abrupt ending. We're not sure if it was due to the cross-dimensional stuff not being fully fleshed out, or the team's attempts to build out the Dead by Daylight universe to mixed results, but we didn't feel particularly satisfied when the credits rolled. It was a good experience, an entertaining one, but we were left wanting more come the game's conclusion. We reckon a couple more hours of story build up and character development could have led to a more satisfying ending for The Casting of Frank Stone.

As for overall performance, Frank Stone is a solid effort all round. We only have one straight 30FPS mode to mess around with on Xbox Series X, but that doesn't really matter for a game that's actually cinematic like this one. What we will say is that once again, this team has delivered some gorgeous visuals here - especially the character work and facial animation, which is really top notch. You need the performances to be engaging and believable in this type of game, and Supermassive hasn't let us down with The Casting of Frank Stone.