The Casting of Frank Stone™

I really wanted to like this, but I am honestly disappointed.. it went by so quickly and it could have been interesting but the best/funniest thing was whenever you could go "Look, X! Just like in Dead by Daylight!" I know that Supermassive Games are usually more story heavy rather than big on the gameplay but :( I wouldn't get it again.

[h2]My Score: 6.5/10[/h2] So far, the weakest link in franchise. My honest opinion. [h3]The pros:[/h3] [list] [*]The graphics are modern and very good. If your hardware is capable, the lighting and particles are superb - based on Unreal Engine 5. It comes with a huge downside too. [*]Great voice acting [*]The concept is not bad but it is dragging on too long [*]The Frank Stone designs are really good [*]At least the START of the game was VERY promising until it took a nosedive after. I really had a great first impression [*]Interesting choices! [/list] [h3]The cons:[/h3] [list] [*]An UE title comes with various challenges. Although I could play it smoothly, it did suffer from minor micro stutters when commencing into a new scene. It just lasted a second so it wasn't a big deal. HOWEVER, there were certain indoor places and I could notice the huge FPS drop from 100 down to 60 or below!!!! That was INDOOR. I must conclude that the optimization is subpar, unfortunately [*]Unfortunately, there were no interesting people or characters to like [*]The story dragged on forever, slowly, uninspiring and boring. I didn't like the pacing [*]The ending was a bit weird and very unsatisfying. [/list] Overall, quality-wise this title is NO match against The Dark Pictures Anthology games, especially House of Ashes, The Devil in Me etc. Even The Quarry had more soul and better pacing. For the sake of completing the game 100%, I played different scenes again to get the achievements. But I wasn't necessarily driven or motivated to play the game without pauses in-between because it was boring. Grab it when it's on sale. Maybe you'll like it but don't set your hope too high.

Frank Stone. My key. My killer.

A thumbs down for The Casting of Frank Stone for hitting me with a hard lock bug 2+ hours into a game with no checkpoints(except the automatic one that locks you in) unless you pony up extra money to access basic functionality early. After restarting I encountered a second hard lock bug where a NPC stopped moving permanently but luckily their button input was tied to a location and not them. As Frank Stone struggles to be mid I can't say it's worthwhile even for the $8 I spent. Missing the mark in storytelling, basic quality of life and abuse of the Unreal 5 engine, Frank Stone feels like BHVR contracted an uninterested studio to serve up anything with the Dead by Daylight name with quality a distant concern. If you're not familiar with DbD then Frank Stone will be an extra mediocre horror story, though setting knowledge offers very little to reward fans beyond small references. Casting follows a cult matron working to forge a new servant of The Entity, a malevolent spider god that plucks those who catch its interest into an eternal realm of cat and mouse to feast on the suffering produced by complaints about game balance. I mean uh, ritualistic sacrifice and the false hope of escape. The matron is guiding serial killer Frank Stone to become one of these iconic killers and he's gotten a good head start at the local steel mill. The narrative bounces between the Frank Stone case and its aftermath, goofy teens filming an amateur horror movie and a unity store assets mansion in the modern day. Gameplay is stiff. Characters move slowly, running is often restricted, everything feels a bit off and it's easy to brush against any part of the scenery where you'll be stopped and turned around. There's not much to do in the corridors and occasional box room you'll be exploring until you find the next white highlight to interact with. There are little touches added to the game that feel like test features that shipped. You find a cabinet door to open, interact with it to look at it. You may look around, you won't find anything doing this but you may. Hold another button to grip and pull back to "realistically" open it! While the attempt to build immersion is cute it just feels as awkward as the rest, clunky padding trying to cover for the absence of game. Perhaps if anything was done with these interactions they'd matter, like controlling the speed to produce less noise, or some gore gags for fun? With a single digit number of monster encounters with no tension this is somehow an adventure game setup that feels duller than any ever made. That most of the game is dedicated to cutscenes with the occasional dialogue choice or barebones QTE skill checks(it's like DbD!!! Wow!!!) doesn't feel much better. Frank Stone is pretty much an overdone visual novel with painfully little spectacle, soured by an inability to skip anything. For a title that wants to be replayed repeatedly to see the roads not taken this is poison for the meat of exploring a branching story. On top of all of that... it's short! Although bloated and tedious to replay the actual narrative struggles to fill in personalities or motivations for half the cast, has some truly goofy plot holes, events happen for no reason and so on. I will stop beating the dead horse to say that at least as far as this style of game goes(i.e. The Walking Dead, other Supermassive games) that Frank Stone does a decent job of making choices matter and offering different outcomes. A shame that seeing them all is such a chore. It's no secret that Casting is poorly optimized, made worse by few graphics options to do anything about it. Turning off motion blur made the game playable though stuttering and lag popped in for frequent visits. While at times Frank Stone looks good, even cool, it seems like some scenes got much more attention than others. I was laughing aloud at the horrible lighting in one of the climax scenes. The art direction isn't awful but there are several shots and environment pieces that look unfinished. Characters offer awkward jittering animations or their models stretch in a way that suggested the modeler called it a day early and sometimes the lighting or color filtering is just completely busted, like somebody pushed a dial to 100 and gave up. For a game struggling to be sincere Frank Stone at times looks and feels lazy and generic, which is a shame for all the hassle it takes to run it. Alright, it's not that fun to play, it has technical issues and debilitating bugs, it's graphically demanding but artistically dull(aside from Frank being cool as the monster), surely Casting can deliver a good story? Ah, close but no machete. I'll be frank(heh) and say that I actually don't mind the cast, even when they're obnoxious. Horror has a long history of putting idiots and jerks in awful situations. It's even part of the appeal, to see how these wretches got here and watch the worst of them meet a grizzly end. The modern day crew are mostly dull or serviceable and while the plot suggests several cool twists and implications it doesn't go anywhere with almost any of them, again suffering from Casting's short narrative. Extra sections of playable character building(i.e. Stan, Robert, an alternate time loop, etc) would help cover the gaps. There are several spots where of the 14 chapters some are as short as cutscene, hallway, cutscene and done, things like that. There was certainly room to add a bit more game to the game. Other than enjoying the rise of monster Frank Stone there's just not anything really cool going on. You might accidentally stumble across a good death, Casting has a few, but most of the game is a dull plodding trudge up until the finale where finally something concrete happens. Resolve a few character fates, get a mediocre ending, want to replay it? No thanks! Aside from mild fondness of the teenager crew filming the horror movie and their parts in the monster chase scenes there wasn't too much to enjoy about Casting. Even then those sections suffer from everything wrong with the game. Long dialogue stretches, a meandering do-little plot, weak gameplay. Even when interacting with the monster there's not much to do. He always arrives with loud, unmissable audio and visual cues in one way hallways and is defeated by staring at him. There are difficulty settings to make the QTEs and this harrowing gameplay more obnoxious but that will just slow down your decision making as to whether you want to live or die right now and try to find new scenes. As per most of Casting it's pointless. I feel some sympathy for Frank Stone. I winced as the credits, unskippable of course, listed the dozens of people who worked on this game. Every so often a good idea or a nice character moment surfaces, a bit of genuine charm, soon smothered by the feeling of playing Casting. I don't know how this game could be saved other than to demake it in UE4, go significantly harder on the art direction, add some extra gameplay stretches for underused characters, adjust the pacing dramatically and some big rewrites to address plot holes too dumb to even get the horror movie pass. As for the die-hard horror/DbD fan or the lost adventure game/visual novel enthusiast you can do a lot better. You can also watch a playthrough. Maybe I'd offer this game a grouchy thumbs up for an on sale price point if they patched the worst bugs but I'm not expecting anyone to come back to this haunted body of work.

Eu juro que queria entender o que passou na cabeça da equipe responsável pela otimização desse jogo visto que, otimização aqui simplesmente não existe. A história te envolve, te intriga e te faz querer jogar mais para explorar a fundo a lore do DBD, porém é tanto drop de FPS e travadas aleatórias que todo o entusiasmo vira frustração e você fica em dúvida se rusha o jogo pra acabar logo ou simplesmente espera sentado um update milagroso aparecer. Meu PC não é uma bomba e até uma amiga minha que também comprou o jogo com o PC da NASA relatou os mesmos problemas mesmo jogando no low. Você perde muito tempo procurando a melhor maneira pro jogo rodar e ter certa fluidez. Um potencial desperdiçado e sinceramente espero que melhorem.

gameplay was average story was good storwise 10/10 and game was also not much optimized yeah but still i'll recommend to play this game because story was something different it was like stranger things story but in a game overall 7/10.

Korkunç optimizasyonu sahip oyun. Daha oyunun başında çökme hatası veriyor. İnanılmaz sinir bozucu.

ПРОСТО КАЛЛ\ Я ЗА ДВА ЧАСА СГНИЛ В ЭТОЙ ХУ;]! МАКСИМАЛЬНО НЕ ЖИВЫЕ ДИАЛОГИ, СЮЖЕТ ДЫРЯВЫЙ КАК МАТЬ РАЗРАБОВ. ЧИСТО РАДИ КОСМЕТИКИ ИЛИ ЕСЛИ ВЫ ГОВНОЕД КАК Я. СПАСИБО БХВР ИДИТЕ НА ♥♥♥