‘The Casting Of Frank Stone’ review: plodding horror mystery makes for a long night

NME

In cinema, the horror genre has made big, if grisly business of the same strict and predictable formulae for decades: cast of young unknowns stranded in remote locale, incapacitated smartphones, dispensable minority characters, a stalking evil, jump scares and disembowellings you could set your watch by. So why not survival horror gaming too? It’s been almost 10 years now since Supermassive Games awed the world with 2015’s Until Dawn, taking the butterfly effect, decision-based drama model of Quantic Dream plodders like Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls and making a truly immersive cinematic horror experience from them. Since then, there’s been a prequel (2018’s The Inpatient) and “spiritual successor” (2022’s The Quarry); now The Casting Of Frank Stone transfers almost identical mechanics into the Dead By Daylight universe pretty much untouched and unevolved. If it ain’t broke…?

• Read more: Dead By Daylight directors on eight years of terror: “We rolled the dice”

The trouble is, for current generation consoles, the decade-old Until Dawn model really needs fixing. As before, you watch it more than you play it and, to its credit, Frank Stone is a brilliantly imaginative rethink of survival horror storytelling. In 1963, a police officer named Sam Green, searching for a missing infant, follows his instincts to the Cedar Steel Mill – the kind of towering hellscape of an edifice that might as well be doing a two-for-one special on psychopath basements on Booking.com. Deep within its clanking machinery, Green eventually discovers a serial killer named Frank Stone about to murder the child and (in our playthrough at least) shoots the hulking great git, who then dissolves into the very fabric of the mill itself.

From there the narrative splits into two interweaving timelines. In 1980, conveniently pre-iPhone, a group of teenagers sneak into the mill to complete a DIY horror movie called Murder Mill set there, only to find themselves hunted down by the incorporeal Stone. And in England, 2024, three strangers Madison, Bruno and Linda – one of the film’s original film-makers, now a revered elder statesman of cinema – are summoned to the baronial abode of the mysterious Augustine Lieber to discuss the purchase of each of their rare reels of Murder Mill, now a lost film notorious for sending any audience that watches it into a violent frenzy.

Exploring Lieber’s endlessly spooky Gerant Manor, with its secret passages and musical box puzzling, is far more enveloping (in a blatantly Resident Evil sense) than the standard slasher flick vibe of the 1980s thread. And the narrative is low on horror beats in favour of atmospheric threat-work for the first half of the roughly 10-hour game, presumably so your characters don’t all get offed too long before the final reel. Still, once the timelines begin to merge and the resurrected Stone is on the (electrical green) rampage, a compulsive and original Netflix series emerges. It’s just a shame the game itself gets in the way.

You see, on the brief occasions that the player takes control of one or other of the numerous playable characters, Frank Stone becomes a supermassive drag. Character movement, for a start, feels like wading through a tar pit deep in uncanny valley. You walk like you’re still working out how knees work, and run like a toddler on a Segway. Running jump? Faggeddaboudit. If you need to turn around on some stairs, best clear a month from your diary.

What few moments of actual horror come along in the early hours are utterly killed by the sluggishness of the movement. “We should get the hell out of here!” yells one teenager upon the discovery of a store room full of dismembered body parts, then stands still for an age, unable to step over a pebble. Another terrified, adrenaline-pumped potential gore-bag of a character, in a nail-biting race to escape the approaching Stone, clambers, agonisingly slowly, onto a scissor lift as if they’ve all the time in the world. Run into an immovable object and you’re suddenly doing funky dances, and expect to spend a fair amount of playtime circling some ludicrously positioned prompt spots.

When examining things up close, it’s even worse – the ‘look around’ option has all the scope and range of a recent neck injury patient. And how long does it take you to pick up a book? Quadruple it. But perhaps the game’s worst trait is in treating the player like an imbecile throughout. Playable areas are tediously linear. “It’s a maze down here,” says our heroic policeman, entering an underground area of about three tunnels; exploration, such as there is, quickly becomes unrewarding as you navigate extremely sparse and obvious environment puzzles – one movable platform, one yellow rag hanging from a hole in the wall – in order to pick up seemingly pointless trinket and cranky Dead By Daylight Rellik doll collectibles. Clues, ways forward and necessary objects are incessantly highlighted, and there’s no picking up items as you go and working out when to use them later; most objects you need won’t even appear – quite nearby actually – until you need them. As for all the personal letters, recordings and newspapers left lying around on random boxes, don’t worry your over-tired little dumb gamer head about taking in their contents or giving them any thought to help solve anything. Just having interacted with them will give you the extra prompts you need. Even if, far too often, we’ve read them upside down.

Much is made of the butterfly effect mechanism, with branching narratives leading off from every major decision you make, splaying off towards a multitude of different endings depending on who survives the effects of your choices. But, after almost 10 years, there’s been no evolution of the technique here beyond pure luck. There are no subtle clues or pointers towards what might be the best decision to make, and all of the skilful relationship-building you can do in the lengthy interactions between characters can also feel like effort wasted. That you carefully and sensitively managed to talk your girlfriend out of dumping you doesn’t mean squat if making the random wrong decision between fight and flee two minutes later sees you carved up like a Salt Bae steak. Meanwhile, quick time events come at you from nowhere, often far more important to your future survival than anything you’ve had to think about for all those hours.

“This night keeps going and going,” says Madison, deep into a game short on individual character, drama or thrill. And even though there’s an unlockable Cutting Room Floor mode which allows you to go back and replay decisions in the hope of keeping everyone alive – and, of course, that much-vaunted re-playability value to try out different outcomes – it’s not a night you’d want to drag yourself through more than once.

‘The Casting Of Frank Stone’ is out now on Xbox Series X and S, PS5 and PC

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