The mascot horror genre has been one of the most popular genres since the release of Five Nights at Freddy’s. That said, not all developers can truly make a compelling title. One look at Steam makes it obvious that it is rather challenging to create something truly worth playing.
So, Finding Frankie faces the challenge of breaking through the stigma that has permeated the genre, especially on online platforms. This is a huge task as Superlou Games, the developer of Finding Frankie, is a new team with only one game published – this one! Is Finding Frankie a game that rises above the rest, or does it get lost in the midst of a packed horror genre?
There Is A Story, Right?
The story for Finding Frankie has an interesting premise, but I am unsure how I feel about it. Essentially, the titular Frankie sends out four boxes of cereal, and whoever finds one of them earns the chance to compete for a million dollars. So, think Willy Wonka mixed with Wipeout, but instead of having a group of people sing about getting fat, you instead get mutilated by a mechanical rabbit. That’s fun, right?
However, outside of the initial cutscene until the ending, the story is almost nonexistent. This normally wouldn’t matter, but the ideas posed in the beginning are too interesting to just forget. Instead, each character has a lot of gaps in their reasons for hunting you outside of Frankie. While never properly explained, you are exploring what can only be described as a giant funhouse. This lack of explanation is what I find the most frustrating about Finding Frankie: it doesn’t explain anything to satisfaction. So much is either left to your imagination or you are asked to just not think about it too much.
Still, I am usually not so harsh on the story during a horror game because, usually, being afraid is the main goal. However, the story feels hollow, almost an excuse for the scares and chase scenes. This style of horror can work for only so long before I stop caring and decide to find something else to occupy my time.
Running Through The Factory
The gameplay is a surprising mix of survival horror and parkour that feels like it could work well together. In fact, for most of the game, I feel like the parkour adds to the tension of each chase until you realize how fast you are. There are only two speeds in Finding Frankie: fast and even faster. This speed plays a major role during chase scenes because the animatronics will consistently stay right behind you.
However, while they get very close, they will never catch you unless you stop and wait for too long. For me, this is where most of the puzzles fall flat. All these segments involve you running down a long hallway, looking for breakers to turn on, excluding some open areas. This gets boring fast, and I’m not sure why there couldn’t have been a different type of puzzle.
The only other gameplay challenge is parkour challenges, and while they are fun, there isn’t much variety with them. They are also very unreliable because they try to work on a context-based system. Basically, you only have four actions you can perform in the game: running, crouching, sliding, and jumping. While the game will state that you can vault over low hurdles, there aren’t many other context-sensitive actions.
For example, you will not be grabbing onto any ledges, nor will you be running across any walls. This is especially important due to a different mechanic in the game that I will call wall trampolines. You will jump into the wall, and they will bounce you across to the next wall trampoline. However, there is a small difference to this because while you perform said action, you have to mash the jump button.
This wouldn’t be that big of a deal, except that the game doesn’t make this clear, which led to many early deaths. That’s another problem: after the early tutorial, Finding Frankie doesn’t explain much about the mechanics. I admit there isn’t much to explain outside of this, but I constantly felt like I was missing something. There are also a lot of mechanics that feel like they might fit into the direction of the game, but they were not present.
The first would be to simply run on walls without needing a trampoline. In fact, I could see where having a mixture of both a trampoline and wall running would lead to some really interesting chases. Another mechanic I would have loved to see is more context sensitive actions like grabbing ledges and jumping off of them. There is so much room for a slightly better experience that would have benefitted both you and the newly implemented leaderboards.
These leaderboards will incentivize you further to start speedrunning the game and compare with friends. This feature is a shock that it wasn’t already in the game as the entire experience has been catered for speedrunners. The most obvious tell is that in most of the screenshots in this very article, the bottom left holds the time I spent with the game. It’s embarrassing, but my time was around the two-hour mark, and that is with many mistakes, losing me precious seconds.
Further Down the Rabbit Hole
Finding Frankie is a confusing mix of potential and the loss of it. It does so much that could draw in a large group of fans, but ultimately, the game doesn’t follow through. This is most felt in the story and its presentation, but I even found the gameplay itself to be lacking in areas. The mechanics feel incomplete at times, and at its worst, the game feels unreliable.
Out of everything, this is the most disappointing takeaway to me, as so much could be expanded on that would make this a must-play. Instead, there is something here, but it will more than likely be for those looking for a new game to speedrun. In the end, Finding Frankie does a lot to stand out from its contemporaries, but not in a good way.
Despite Finding Frankie not quite living up to my expectations, I still do think there is fun to be had here, though I encourage you to know what you are walking into. This is the first title from developer SUPERLOU, and I feel that future titles could expand further on the ideas presented in Finding Frankie. Regardless of what comes next from SUPERLOU, I’ll certainly be looking forward to it.
Disclaimer: SUPERLOU provided Final Weapon with a PlayStation 5 copy of Finding Frankie for review purposes.
