Finding Frankie

My first instinct when I loaded Finding Frankie was to brace for another cynical FNAF clone coasting on creepy character designs and cheap jump scares. What I did not expect was to spend most of my time actually running, wall-jumping, and grinding rails in a first-person platformer that feels closer to a deranged cousin of Mirror's Edge than anything born from the mascot horror cottage industry. SUPERLOU built this largely solo, and that handcrafted quality is visible throughout, even when the seams show. The setup is wonderfully absurd: you find a VHS tape inside a box of Frankie's Fruit Flakes cereal, which invites you to compete in a game show at Frankie's Parkour Palace for a five-million-dollar prize. Within minutes, the titular animatronic has murdered your fellow contestants and you are alone in a massive indoor obstacle complex, running for your life instead of running for money. The pivot is efficient and the dark-web game show lore humming in the background, with over 19,000 viewers watching contestants die live, gives the world a genuinely unsettling texture that rewards curious explorers. Scattered relics and environmental details flesh out the mystery without ever overwhelming the momentum. Six distinct zones make up the palace, each with its own visual identity, from a vibrant water park and a trampoline arena to icy mountain slopes and a dark labyrinthine level that openly riffs on Fall Guys' Hex-A-Gone finale. The parkour mechanics, covering bar swinging, wall jumps, rail grinding, sliding, and trampoline hopping, feel energetic even when the controls are imprecise. Swinging from pipes in particular requires a genuinely awkward multi-input sequence that will frustrate newcomers repeatedly. The game also drops you in without a clear tutorial, which means the first twenty minutes involve a lot of trial-and-error deaths before the rhythm clicks. Stick with it, because once it does click, there is real pleasure in flowing through a well-designed chase corridor with Frankie thundering behind you. The companion mechanic, a small animatronic duck called Deputy Duck unlocked around the halfway mark, adds a light radar and flashlight function without dramatically altering the gameplay loop. The standout level is the Hotline Maze, a dark, night-sky corridor where you activate telephones while avoiding the menacing Henry Hotline, voiced with an uncanny corner-to-corner grin that genuinely unsettles. The intercom announcer commentary throughout is a consistent highlight, landing that specific dark-comedy register most mascot horror games fumble. The honest caveat is length. A confident first run lands somewhere between one and two hours, and while the soundtrack is creepy-dramatic in exactly the right way and the cartoonish-meets-realistic art direction is striking, the core breaker-box flip loop does repeat across zones without enough variation to disguise it. If you arrive wanting deep horror, the tension comes from speed and survival pressure rather than atmosphere or dread. The Steam community sits at 90% positive across over 1,700 reviews, which suggests most buyers know what they are signing up for, but the short runtime remains a legitimate concern worth weighing before purchasing. For the right player, specifically someone who enjoys precision first-person platforming, has a soft spot for the mascot horror aesthetic without needing it to be genuinely scary, and can appreciate a tight small-team production that knows exactly what kind of game it wants to be, Finding Frankie punches well above its weight class. The speedrunning legs are real, the voice acting is a genuine surprise, and the whole thing has a specific handmade sincerity that separates it from the cynical end of this very crowded genre. It is short, it is a little rough, and I wanted more of it the moment the credits rolled. That last part counts for a lot.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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