There is no escaping the insane popularity of mascot horror games. Ever since Five Nights at Freddy’s completely shifted the paradigm on horror games, everyone has been quick to cash in on the low budget and low effort success. Compounded with the rise of streamers mugging their web cams and overeating to a bloody mascot, there’s an endless ocean to choose from.
Not all mascot horror games are made equally. A majority of them are cynically made trash that’s looking to ride the wave of Freddy’s success. Some exceptions apply like the imaginative Amanda the Adventurer, or the Bendy games, but for the most part, the genre is saturated with imitators and cheap copies.
Can there be a mascot horror game that breaks the mold and proves to be more than another copycat? Is first-person parkour a good idea? Or is this more streamer bait for the pile? Find out in out Finding Frankie review!
Finding Frankie
Developer: SUPERLOU
Publisher: SUPERLOU, Perpetual Europe
Platforms: Windows PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S (reviewed)
Release Date: April 15, 2025
Price: $14.99
Finding Frankie’s intro is like a twisted version of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Several kids in the world find winning VHS tapes in their Frankie cereal and the chance to participate in the ultimate physical challenge at an indoor trampoline adventure park.
The park turns out to be a lot more than any of the kids bargained for and turns into a bloodbath set in nightmarish obstacle courses that demand peak performance. As expected, the place is overrun with killer animatronics, death traps, pitfalls, grueling gauntlets, and cheap pizza. What will murder you first? The mechanical killer rabbit or the crappy food?
Finding Frankie has a promising set up that elevates it above similarly themed killer mascot games, yet it utterly bungles it in its execution. The moment the game begins, players will be left confused and frustrated by cheap design that instantly breaks immersion and are left wondering what the developer expects of them.
The first room is a cheap trick where the player is pitted with a few AI controlled NPCs who are about to sprint in a race toward a set of double doors. The thing is this is a trap and the instant those doors open, Frankie shows up flailing around and killing NPCs and the player character if they get close.
When you die from this the first time, it’s an amusing gag on the player. The second time you think you’ve learned your lesson and you turn around try to find another route, but you can’t. Frankie kills your again and you’re left wondering, “the hell am I supposed to do?”, instead of getting absorbed in the setting.
After getting killed in seconds by trying to figure out what to do, you try to do things that fly in the face of logic. On the sixth time Frankie devours the NPC children, I realized you are supposed to hug the walls around him and get behind him to make it through the door he bursts from. This set a bad precedent moving forward and it only gets worse.
Finding Frankie‘s core gameplay is parkour obstacles and exploration. Movement is fast and sliding is like the protagonist farting a sonic boom that launches them at neck-breaking speeds. You can perform vaults, pole swings, and even some light wall-running/jumping. The park is also decked out with a variety of trampolines, grinding rails, and a ton of esoteric physics-based contraptions.
Finding Frankie has a decent variety packed into its surprisingly brief play time, but you’ll be grateful when it ends. The game is seemingly designed to annoy players and to assault them with as much unearned jumpscares as possible. There are stealth sequences where there’s a marauding animatronic and its not clear what qualifies as hiding, leading to an unfair death where the killer clips through objects to run the death animation.
At one point there is a radar device power up that shows objects through walls, but its totally useless because it doesn’t show where the phone-head guy is patrolling. What’s even more confusing is that the item is never used again outside of this one set-piece.
The main showpiece to Finding Frankie are the frantic chases through nightmarish fun house obstacle courses. Like everything else in this game, it’s great in theory but botched in practice. You need to hit your mark perfectly during these moments, otherwise the mascot kills the protagonist and the entire course has to be restarted. This is where the horror atmosphere diminishes after multiple retries, like in the intro.
When dashing through the courses, you barely have enough time to process what you are supposed to do at first since the visual design is usually very busy. Other times the mascot will cheat and teleport ahead of the player, leading to an unearned game over. The parkour is less about skill, and more of a matter of memorizing what you need to do.
Finding Frankie should have been awesome. It could have been Five Nights at Freddy‘s meets Mirror’s Edge. Sadly it embodies some of the worst aspects of what mascot horror has to offer. It’s a cheaply made and obnoxious assault to the senses that is more headache inducing than scary.
Finding Frankie was reviewed on Xbox Series X using a code provided by SUPERLOU. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here. Finding Frankie is now available for PC (via Steam), Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5.
