The Casting Of Frank Stone Preview

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dead by Daylight is a strange game. It’s renowned these days for its mashup of iconic horror characters, pitting the Xenomorph from Alien against 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil’s Leon Kennedy, burying the identity it once had beneath📖 a mountain of licensed crossovers. So, when a standalone, narrative-driven spin-off was announced, it’s unsurprising that many of❀ the responses were, ‘But what about the IP?’

The Casting Of Frank Stone Already Proves It Doesn’t Need Crossovers

Thankfully, Supermassive Games’ The Casting of Fran💫k Stone isn&rsq✅uo;t fussed about what Dead by Daylight has become, but instead what put Behaviour Interactive on the map in the first place. It’s easy to forget that the hit asymmetrical horror was once merely inspired by ‘00s shlock with its grungy industrial backdrops and muddy brown overtones, rather than being full of it.

It was like stepping through the silver screen into an era of horror that so many of us grew up with; the underrated 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Friday the 13th remake, the Sam Raimi classic Drag Me to Hell, and secluded rural hau🐭nts like The House of Wax. That feeling has long since been lost, but here, it’s back in style.

The Casting of Frank Stone killer standing in a doorway holding a machete

In the brief hour I played of The Casting of Frank Stone, it’s al❀ready a faithful homage to Dead by Daylight as much as it is the movies that influenced it. The titular villain is 🃏refreshingly new, but already feels right at home in Behaviour’s story and the era it builds from. The setting of an ominous rundown factory could easily have been ripped right from the main game, too.

It doesn’t need IP to remind you that 1🅘68澳洲幸运5开奖网:it’s a Dead by Daylight spin-off, the aesthetic alone tells you that this is another corner of that same world, speaking volumes to how carefully Supermassive has paid attention to Behaviour's work.

The Opening Prologue Is A Great Hook

The Casting of Frank Stone cop car driving through the Cedar Steel Corp factory's open gate

It begins with a police officer called Sam visiting the Cedar Steel Corp in 1963 to investigate the disappearance of a young boy. A strange🦩 employee and his dog welcome you inside like Norman Bates to his motel, but before long the two of you are pooling through guts and gore to inspect sliced-off human ears. The fog strangling the factory heig𝔍htens the claustrophobia, and the oppressive shadows burying you in darkness make every corner unsettling to peer around.

It’s an ominous, understated beginning that lets the setting speak for itself. The tension builds, with the middle of nowhere doing what the middle of nowhere does best. But as you venture deeper into the beating heart of this uncanny mill, you find a room illuminated by bright orange red lights with a baby wailing beside a scorching fire. Frank Stone stands before you, a giant lumbering old man who feels like a forgotten member of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Texas Chain Saw Massacre family.

Quick-time-events dictate how this fight goes, but, in a cleꦕver decision, they play out a lot like the generator minigames in Dead by Daylight, giving the usual Supermassive formula some familiarity for fans of Behaviour’s game.

I shone my flashlight in Frank Stone’s eyes and pushed him over the railing into a pit of spikes, one of which separated his jaw from his head. The cinematography is already outstanding, as the camera slowly pans down to reveal his fragmented face. The shocking slasher vio𒆙lence isn’t being shied away from.

It’s More Until Dawn And The Quarry Than The Dark Pictures

The Casting of Frank Stone feels closer to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Until Dawn and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Quarry than it is to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Dark Pictures. As much as I love Supermassive’s anthology series, it ha🌠s yet to reach the heights of its🎐 standalone works, but Frank Stone has the chance to do just that. The characters, even in the prologue section before the meat of the story, hooked me from go.

Sam was endearingly naive, a little too trustworthy of the strange man lurking in the factory at night, but his goodhearted nature made exploring this unnerving, empty setting in the pitch black a lot more bearable. The old man grew on me too. In just 40 minutes, he went from a creepy red herring to a comical knife cutting through the tension, all while never undermining it. I quickly became enthralled in the two’s brief story, something that Until Dawn and The Quarry did especially well in their𝐆 openings too.

It’s a bold start that feels like a classic horror opening scene, like Casey Becker’s untimely demise in Scream and the friends on a cabin retreat in Evil Dead Rise. It eases you into the world with a bite, showing just how visceral the visuals can be while still guiding you through how these games play, giving you a taste of exploration and the smaller choices you’ll make to seal each character’s fate. I can’t wait to peel back the curtain further and find out where this story goes, to see how Frank Stone returns to terrorise Cedar Hills. After just an hour, I’m in.