Supermassive is as on-form as ever with The Casting of Frank Stone, a Dead by Daylight spin-off for fans of lore and gore – hands-on preview

Even the briefest glance at promotional materials for The Casting of Frank Stone reveals that it is a story “from the world of Dead by Daylight”. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the title screen of the game itself, where the franchise’s name is up there equally as big and bold as the game’s actual title.

But regardless of the IP it’s being released under, make no mistake: The Casting of Frank Stone is a Supermassive game through and through. How you feel about playing it will probably have a lot more to do with how much you enjoy that studio’s horror-flavoured adventure game stylings, than whether you’re a fan of Behaviour Interactive’s all-devouring horror IP toybox of an asymmetric online multiplayer.

I’m in the fortunate position of being a fan of both DBD and Supermassive, with a particularly hyperfixational relationship with the latter’s already extensive catalogue of interactive movie-style horror games, so naturally I’m eating well on this one. And while minute-to-minute this may be mainly one for the Supermassive fans, DBD lore nerds would also be remiss to sleep on it just because it plays differently from the main game.

This isn’t the first time that Dead by Daylight has flirted with the idea of a spin-off and turned to the experts to carry it out. Back in 2022, Hooked on You: A Dead by Daylight Dating Simulator was released courtesy of Psyop, the team best known for producing that KFC dating sim that was somehow a complete game with surprisingly high production values and not an April Fool’s tweet. Despite its goofy premise — or, to be fair, probably precisely because of it — Hooked on You was carried out with all the earnestness of a team who know exactly how to work their chosen genre.

So naturally, for a story-rich and lore-heavy Dead by Daylight adventure game, Behaviour Interactive have turned to Supermassive Games — the studio behind iconic interactive horror drama Until Dawn, and its spiritual sequels The Quarry and The Dark Pictures Anthology — to do what they do best and run with the concept.

Supermassive’s QTE-oriented gameplay integrates extremely well with Dead by Daylight’s signature skill checks, so DBD enthusiasts who’ve never checked out an interactive adventure like this before won’t be left completely fumbling. But while The Casting of Frank Stone does promise both single-player and multiplayer options, it’s story-oriented investigative and decision-based optional co-op that’ll see you playing on the same side as all your friends with the aim of helping the protagonists survive, rather than running around a grotty arena furtively fixing up generators while one of you tries to horribly murder the rest.

The full game will follow Supermassive tradition in featuring the perspectives of multiple characters, but in the single-player demo I previewed, the sole playable character is Sam Green, a 1970s police officer and probably not one of the young friends promised as the primary playable group. Sam is the kind of calm and reasonable African-American cop that modern media relies on to carry the audience’s sympathy when the plot calls for a police officer as protagonist, and you know what, he gets away with it. But since it looks as though this is the prologue to the game proper, it’s maybe best not to get too attached to him or Tom — the conspiracy-spouting night shift security guard at the spooky old steel mill which is the game’s central setting, and who presumably will serve as Player 2’s avatar in co-op — since Supermassive prologue protagonists tend to have the kind of life expectancy that would send mayflies into mourning.

If there’s one big stylistic departure from Supermassive’s usual tone to mark this as a Dead by Daylight story specifically, it’s the literal viscera on display. Supermassive don’t exactly shy away from gory imagery, but nevertheless the scene I found most memorable in this preview was the one where Sam spends a surprisingly long time plunging his hands into a pile of organic ick that he and Tom encounter while searching the grounds of the steel mill for a missing child. Sam shows no hesitation getting wrist-deep in the stuff even before identifying it as human remains, in what rapidly descends into a classic Supermassive funnier-than-it’s-probably-meant-to-be exchange as he and Tom calmly debate what on earth all this gooey red stuff with a rib cage sticking out of it might be.

Those odd slips into surrealist goofiness suit the tone of a Dead by Daylight game particularly well, though, even if I get the feeling that The Casting of Frank Stone — which puts a literal tiny baby in visible peril within this first hour, so you know they mean business — is meant to be a slightly more serious entry into the franchise than the one where Lara Croft and Steve from Stranger Things get menaced by a demented K-Pop idol.

The occasional tonal oddity aside, though, The Casting of Frank Stone features a suitably creepy set-up. Sure, empty steel mills in the dead of night might be a bit of a cliché, but it’s the perfect setting to marry Supermassive’s signature riffs on classic horror with Dead by Daylight’s grimy industrial ambience. Supermassive have spent years honing their craft at this point, so it’s no surprise that they managed to nail both the central setting and the wider atmosphere of the rural Oregon town of Cedar Hills, a community clearly dominated by the inescapable prominence of its central industry.

You can feel the venerable influence of Twin Peaks and Silent Hill as Sam descends into the bowels of the imposing steel mill, helped along in particular by some stellar sound design work that cranks up the dread notch by unbearable notch. For the record, I — comfortably a horror genre veteran — played this demo in a well-lit room in the middle of the afternoon on one of the brightest and hottest days in August, and I was still getting shivers at every distant clang and unidentifiable scurrying sound.

By the end of this 45-minute-ish demo, I’ll admit I still wasn’t entirely sure what exactly is going to make The Casting of Frank Stone a Dead by Daylight story. At one point a character gets pushed onto a steel pipe that goes through his shoulder in a deliberately unsubtle reference to DBD’s iconic meathook spearings, and the tease at the preview’s conclusion has me absolutely sure that it’s all a matter of plot details that will reveal themselves in good time. But there’s not much else on display to differentiate what I’ve seen so far significantly from Supermassive’s other narrative horror games.

Whether this is a downside or not will depend on your reasons for wanting to play The Casting of Frank Stone, of course. Supermassive longtimers like myself will be pleased to be getting more of what they love after an unusually long quiet period from the studio, which recently took a break from its regular annual release schedule and hasn’t put out a new game in 18 months. But Dead by Daylight fans dipping into interactive storytelling for the first time in the hope of a ton of lore details might need to exercise their patience, since the devs have resisted the urge to cram every scene full of easter eggs.

But this has a silver lining, because Supermassive’s attitude to building on the lore of the DBD universe seems to be much more subtle than that — for a given value of “subtle” that includes a huge alien beast with vicious tendrils looming out of the mist. Whether this means we’re getting some key backstory about The Entity’s arrival on this plane of reality, or a self-contained lore snippet about some creep named Frank Stone before he inevitably gets added to DBD’s killer roster, remains to be seen. Fortunately, you don’t need to be a Dead by Daylight megafan to grasp what Supermassive have put together here — an appreciation for atmospheric horror stories is all that’s required.