Dead by Daylight spinoff The Casting of Frank Stone needed to go harder

Dead by Daylight is an enormously popular and successful game. Behaviour Interactive has used that as a springboard for other projects, like Deathgarden: Bloodharvest, Meet Your Maker, and Islands of Insight. But none have proven as successful as the developer’s flagship project, which Behaviour is now using to experiment with other genres, like the cheeky Dead by Daylight dating sim Hooked on You or the upcoming co-op shooter currently codenamed Project T. The most recent attempt in this vein, a spinoff narrative game called The Casting of Frank Stone, shows a lot of promise — but it also reveals the trouble in expanding Dead by Daylight into a big, story-rich franchise.

You may be forgiven for not even knowing that Dead by Daylight has a labyrinth of lore, told through item descriptions, in-game diary entries, short animations, and character biographies. These narratives don’t show up in a normal match of the 1v4 asymmetrical multiplayer game in which Survivors attempt to outwit and escape a nefarious Killer. For those who aren’t tuned in to new character releases, it’s possible to lose the original cast in the shuffle as Behaviour introduces new, licensed tie-ins like Trevor Belmont, Jill Valentine, or Lara Croft.

Enter The Casting of Frank Stone, developed by Supermassive, which also stars a whole new cast of characters involved in the Dead by Daylight mythos. Dead by Daylight is made up of murderous Killers trapped in a realm of torment called the Fog, where they endlessly hunt Survivors in this cyclical kind of hell dimension. But what happens before the Fog rolls in to claim a new Killer and some poor Survivors? That has largely been left up to player imagination, but each new spinoff has explored the nature of the Fog a little more closely.

The Casting of Frank Stone fits nicely in with the rest of Supermassive’s catalog as a five-to-six-hour game; the player must navigate the game’s heroes through a narrative experience, passing quick-time challenges and making choices that will determine their fate. The story plays out across three time periods, and depending on the player’s decisions, characters can meet a whole variety of grisly fates, from a simple stabbing all the way up to rapid aging or death by interdimensional portal.

The game begins in the ’60s, with a showdown against the murderous Frank Stone himself as he prepares to sacrifice an infant to a dark god. Two decades later, a group of young filmmakers decide to create Murder Mill, a B movie based on the local lore around the serial killer Frank Stone and his abandoned steel mill. Finally, in 2024, that movie has become so infamous that it inspires a collector to invite a few guests to her towering manse, each one in possession of a part of Murder Mill. The first half of the game is a slow burn, establishing all this context before really rolling out the scares.

Frank Stone’s dark god, the Entity, looms over all three time periods. The Entity is the antagonist of the Dead by Daylight universe: a distant and uncaring god who wants nothing more than to devour each individual reality of the multiverse. A cult known as the Black Vale is aware of the Entity, and the cult members know that it will notice acts of gruesome murder and heedless slaughter. Frank Stone seems to have caught the Black Vale’s eye, and they begin to prep him as delicious bait for their beloved Entity.

The Black Vale and the Entity are well established in Dead by Daylight canon; the process of someone descending into murder and being claimed by the Entity happens in every single Killer biography. These other characters don’t show up in The Casting of Frank Stone, however; they’re only present in the game through little cameos and Easter eggs.

That non-specificity becomes a big problem in The Casting of Frank Stone — the individual characters hardly seem to matter. Each character feels flat; the narrative has to spend so much time setting up the timelines, the nature of Frank Stone, and the other mysteries of the Dead by Daylight universe that we hardly get to learn more about the game’s other characters, like Madison or Stan in the present day.

The best horror is the kind that speaks to something larger, using the scares to drive toward a greater point. George Romero’s zombies are a critique of consumerism, Jordan Peele’s Us is a story about enjoying privilege off the back of someone else’s suffering, and vampires are deeply tied to themes of wealth, exploitation, and power.

The Casting of Frank Stone gestures at a few interesting avenues, like exploring the impact of our fascination with true crime, or the effect that investigating the Entity might have on one normal man, but ultimately the run time isn’t long enough to commit to any one statement. The end result feels like a story that fills out a fan wiki nicely, but doesn’t stand on its own two feet.

There’s a lot of potential in the Dead by Daylight universe; characters like The Plague or The Doctor have sent chills up my spine. The Casting of Frank Stone is a huge improvement over the lackadaisical Hooked on You, but if I were to recommend a Supermassive game to a friend, I’d be more likely to suggest House of Ashes. Everyone can agree that murder cults are bad; I’d like to see Behaviour use the Dead by Daylight universe to tell a story with some actual teeth.

The Casting of Frank Stone was released Sept. 3 on PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PC using a download code purchased by the author. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.