Telltale’s The Walking Dead was something of a lightning rod for the narrative adventure genre when it released in 2012. Telltale games were notable for their choice-driven gameplay, but the in-game choices were mostly illusory due to the paths all leading to the same outcomes in the end. Until Dawn revitalized a passion for the genre, differentiating itself from Telltale with modernized graphics and choices that held more weight. Although recent Supermassive games such as The Quarry have garnered success, the studio has been trying to emulate the initial sensation that started with Until Dawn for a while now. Their newest project, The Casting of Frank Stone, is a collaboration with the makers of Dead By Daylight, and it might finally rival Until Dawn due to several key factors. Here’s why The Casting of Frank Stone may be one of the biggest games of 2024.
The intersection of the Until Dawn and DBD gaming audiences almost guarantees some modicum of success for The Casting of Frank Stone. Dead By Daylight gets an average of 500,000 players daily, and the Until Dawn community is always eager to try out the newest Supermassive game. The Casting of Frank Stone also just seems like the ideal ‘streaming’ game, possessing all the branching narrative horror quirks that made Until Dawn so popular. Of course, it wouldn’t be a horror drama without a roster of characters that you’ll inevitably have trouble keeping alive.
Like Until Dawn and The Dark Picture Anthology, The Casting of Frank Stone follows a group of teens exploring an abandoned area on the outskirts of a quiet and eerie town. The cast of five teens band together to shoot a horror movie on the grounds of the condemned Cedar Steel Mill property, the spot where the serial killer, Frank Stone, allegedly committed his gruesome murders. All the ingredients are here for the typical Supermassive game, but the chaotic Dead By Daylight lore makes it all the more interesting. The developers strongly hint at DBD death mechanics being at play within The Casting of Frank Stone. The implication here is that, like DBD, characters will be revived after death by the evil machination of The Entity. I can already imagine a pivotal narrative moment when your surviving teens come across a mind-wiped friend in the bowls of the mill and have to face them head-on. The chaotically fluid nature of death within DBD really spices up the narrative formula that Supermassive is known for, making for a far less straightforward story from their past games. Considering how vital the branching endings are in Supermassive games, you can bet we’re going to see the consequences of our actions reflected by DBD’s particularly twisted death system.
You control a variety of different characters within The Casting of Frank Stone, not merely beholden to the perspective of the teens, as the police officer from the game’s prologue shows us. Better yet, the cast of characters behave with non-scripted AI, a stark contrast to Supermassive’s typical linearly-derived narrative experiences. The game’s trailers have managed to impress with top-notch voice acting across a wide range of characters as well. The narrator from the Murder Mill Trailer instills confidence that this game will continue the trend of iconic narration in between chapters that Until Dawn so brilliantly carried forward. While it’s not confirmed yet if The Casting of Frank Stone features a narrator who acts as a throughline of the experience, it is encouraging to hear such a strong trailer narration.
But one thing we are sure of is that Frank Stone is the central antagonist of the game, and as expected, he’s a deadly murderer who fits within DBD’s roster of killers almost to a tee. DBD fans are already speculating what connection Frank Stone has with The Entity. In case DBD fans get too ahead of themselves regarding the protagonists, the developers pretty much deny the existence of character talents and perks, stating that in the Game Informer cover story, “none of them are superheroes”.
But who needs superheroes when you have good old intuition, right? It is theoretically possible to keep every character alive by the end of your time through The Casting of Frank Stone, but it requires a lot of luck and hindsight. The multi-linear ‘Butterfly Effect’ narrative is alive and well in The Casting of Frank Stone. Dialogue choices take the form of a wheel split between different responses and emotions. Through Game Informer’s interviews with Supermassive, we learn that the studio is aiming for more meaningful branching paths akin to Until Dawn rather than the 186 watered-down endings that The Quarry offered. Each character can meet an untimely demise based on your choices and reactions to any given situation. There’s even a flowchart laying out all possible choices and outcomes you can make, which they’ve called the Cutting Room Floor. Every branching choice has a player percentage next to it, indicating the amount of other players who chose that particular path. This flowchart streamlines the process of replaying the game, something Supermassive’s previous games could have used. However, the Cutting Room Floor feature is only unlocked after beating the game, or from the start if you happen to have the Deluxe Edition of the game.
Basic button-timed QTEs were another form of ‘choice’ that the player had in previous Supermassive games, but thankfully, The Casting of Frank Stone offers a more interactive solution. Quick time button prompts are replaced by a Skill Check system taken straight from Dead By Daylight. Skill Checks are still QTEs, in a sense, but they offer more nuance with a gradient meter-stop minigame that DBD fans will recognize. Skill Checks require you to stop the rotating pointer on a small ‘success zone’ within the wheel. As seen in the seven-minute gameplay demo, failure can result in a character getting injured and potentially much worse. If DBD is anything to go by, there will be failure, good, and great zones, which result in different outcomes based on where you land the marker. These Skill Checks may just be a small iteration on timed button prompts at the end of the day, but they certainly offer added nuance while tying into DBD nicely.
Nothing caught my attention quite as much as the painstaking detail the team placed on the worldbuilding for the game. Just watch the “Welcome to Cedar Hills” video and you’ll see what I mean. The team puts special emphasis on the sociological history of Cedar Hills as a steel manufacturing town in Oregon, details that greatly affect the events of the game. The focal point of the game is the Cedar Steel Mill, as reflected in playable segments from the past when the steel mill was still active. The town surrounding the steel mill has been a shell of its former self ever since the mill shut down, with a decaying and lethargic populace adding that ‘sleepy town’ vibe that goes so well with this kind of teen horror game. The devs describe the mill’s furnace tower as an “industrial haunted house”, which accurately describes the decaying remains of the town’s dead industrial heart.
It’s a good thing there’s such attention to detail regarding worldbuilding because The Casting of Frank Stone goes heavy with exploration and hidden objects. As seen from the gameplay demo, the game has a methodical explorative pace to it. The items you pick up and memos you read will no doubt unravel the mystery as to why the steel mill was shut down and what kind of people used to live in Cedar Hills. Further enhancing the inspired locations of the game is the implementation of Unreal Engine 5. This is the first Supermassive game to use UE5, and it shows. The engine upgrade allows the team to make good use of Lumen tools to accentuate the shadows and many dark environments within the labyrinthine steel mill. Furthermore, Nanite allows the devs to use real-world location imagery and replicate it into the game without bottlenecking processing power with realistic detail still intact. Having a branching narrative horror game making full use of Unreal Engine 5 sets The Casting of Frank Stone apart from its competitors and also marks it as the largest game Supermassive has ever made.
The Casting of Frank Stone has the popularity of the Until Dawn audience and the Dead By Daylight fanbase to prop up its general appeal and potential. The devs are pulling out all the stops to create a high-production branching narrative game set in the Dead By Daylight universe with all the chaotic weirdness that entails. This is all augmented further by advancements in Unreal Engine 5 technology and a general increase in scope for this project.
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