As a huge fan of developer Supermassive Games’ interactive horror marathons and publisher Behaviour Interactive’s asymmetrical multiplayer game Dead by Daylight, I thought The Casting of Frank Stone might be a daydream I cooked up during yet another sleepless night. Unfortunately, it’s actually a drawn-out multiverse adventure with a pace that’s just as sluggish as I am.

The game follows Supermassive’s tradition – as with 2015’s cult hit Until Dawn and 2022’s The Quarry – by focusing on a group of small-town teenagers and disgruntled adults, all of whom discover the supernatural evil that permeates their lives. Frank Stone, the game effectively serves as an explanation for Dead by Daylight’s cyclical setup, its repetitive trials between killer and four survivors. But it does so peripatetically, with an original cast of characters facing an original set of circumstances.

Their story unfolds in two overlapping parts: In the ’80s, a group of friends filmed a horror movie in an abandoned steel mill. In 2024, Frank Stone, the guy, is a serial killer whose screaming soul is trapped on murky slices of their Super 8 film. After dying at the plant decades earlier, Frank was integrated into the surging, inexplicable entity, a cosmic spider-creature that players of Dead by Daylight will recognize as that game’s ancestor. So layers of interdimensional sorcery are somehow responsible for this convoluted plot. In this origami timeline, you control various iterations and family members of the original friend group—the young and older versions of stoic director Linda, grieving daughter Madison, and so on.

Yet despite the interesting intricacies of the plot, the catatonic horror of The Casting of Frank Stone is barely explored in the interactive narrative, which spends too much time on extraneous exposition; romantic plot threads fizzle out into nothing, revelations about the characters never come to light again, and so on. You’re left waiting, heavy and dazed as elephant steps, for about four of the roughly six hours of gameplay before the action begins.

In this respect, Frank Stone is the most cinematic of all Supermassive’s interactive horror games. It’s more of a director’s cut film than a game, but its emphasis on movie magic at least means it’s loaded with glorious Unreal Engine 5 graphics; blood glistens so pure it seems to radiate heat, and the game’s many mysterious corners (set in a haunted steel mill, a Victorian mansion, an imaginary damp forest…) appear as dark as a blank mind.

In the past, I’ve found supermassive environments overwhelming, with too many bells and whistles to knock over and parse, but Frank Stone’s unique Plunderer’s Instinct mechanic helps simplify things. Though it’s only available after you’ve either completed a Frank Stone playthrough or purchased the Deluxe Edition of the game, the Plunderer’s Instinct mechanic helpfully highlights important items in cobwebby white.

Aside from a few memorized puzzles and fiddly controls, however, Frank Stone doesn’t give you much to interact with. And when it does, your input feels insignificant. Instead of the thrilling, deadly quicktime chases of previous games, for example, Frank Stone uses Dead by Daylight’s more forgiving skill check windows. It uses them while characters repair sputtering generators (the primary goal of Survivors in DbD) and, less frequently, in the unceremonious seconds before a character is cut into butcher’s parts. In both cases, your contribution to your character’s trajectory feels minimal.

The rest of the game’s interactive aspects feel similarly inconsequential. Sometimes you have to manually balance characters on three-foot-wide sheets of plywood for no reason. On a more positive note, you now have the new option to let characters walk rather than shove them into another slow supermassive shuffle. But none of it matters. A pop-up window ominously alerts you when one of your decisions has “changed” or “sealed” your fate, but many of the game’s “choose your own adventure” dilemmas (react with skepticism or curiosity? Be comforting or confrontational?) seem to have nothing to do with their ultimate outcome.

Even the game’s brand new passive combat system lacks punch. Many characters cling desperately to an enchanted Super 8 camera as if it were a balloon about to burst at any moment. And it might. In many dire cases, this fragile camera acts as the characters’ only lifeline, with the ability to drive away Frank’s restless, apple-green spirit the longer they “film” with it. These moments should be a fitting summary of Supermassive’s long-standing thesis, which is sometimes thrown in your face here: art contains infinite possibilities, and therefore infinite consequences.

But the stakes in the game are often either too low or too obscure. In combat, Frank approaches you from afar and barely moves. He is more of a swaying Halloween decoration than an immediate threat. Outside of combat, death comes too suddenly to feel like a Consequence. It’s more like a random, cold drop of condensation from your air conditioner dripping onto your clean scalp. Unwelcome, but too abrupt to even think about.

But while The Casting of Frank Stone doesn’t quite cut it as a standalone Supermassive game, it’s still satisfying for this Dead by Daylight enthusiast. The game isn’t based on any pre-existing DbD lore, so it should be understandable for any player. But it also contains several careful nods to the source material, such as the way some characters are hung by the shoulder and tied to meat hooks that Killers force survivors to in Dead by Daylight. Killer characters, including the mangled Doctor and Masked Huntress, are also available as chunky collectible dolls, while power add-ons like the Rancid Sacrificial Knife are also available as small metal pendants to collect.

And Frank Stone has great music and oppressive sound design. It borrows several sounds from DbD, including the paranoid keyboard beep that flutters around like a moon moth when you acquire an item, as well as the synth exhale on a successful skill check. Often, you’ll hear the dirge of the Dead by Daylight loading screen resolve in clever ways, hammering its way into your game like a bad thought. Ultimately, The Casting of Frank Stone is most successful in these subtleties, which reflect the trapped rhythm of its connecting timelines and Dead by Daylight survivors hunted for all eternity. Frank Stone’s music repeats, his cast members reappear throughout the story, and life, according to this game, is a wheel you’re tied to. It may not always be pleasant, but the important thing is that it’s yours.

A copy of The Casting of Frank Stone was provided by Behaviour Interactive for review.