Finding Frankie Review (Xbox): A Parkour Horror Game Show That Really Wants You Dead on Live TV

Finding Frankie is not some vague “spooky parkour thing” — it’s a full‑on horror game show where you sprint, swing, and spiral through a nightmare trampoline park while contestants are picked off like it’s prime‑time entertainment.

Available on Xbox, Steam, and PlayStation 5, Finding Frankie lands as a surprisingly sharp mix of parkour, mascot horror, and televised cruelty. Think Fall Guys if it sold its soul to a cereal mascot and a network executive with no moral boundaries.

A cursed cereal box and a game show from hell

The setup is simple and nasty in the best way.

You’re one of four “lucky” people who find a secret tape hidden in a box of Frankie’s cereal, inviting you to compete in a game show at Frankie’s Parkour Palace — a massive, supposedly bankrupt indoor trampoline and parkour park. The prize: an obscene amount of money. The catch: you quickly realize this isn’t a show you walk away from. Not everyone makes it off the course, and “elimination” stops being a metaphor the moment you trip over your first corpse.finding-frankie.fandom.com+2

I like how fast the game gets to the point. No 40‑minute prologue, no overexplaining. You’re in the park, the lights are wrong, the mascots are wrong, the announcer is way too excited about your imminent death, and it all feels just a little too close to something a streaming service would greenlight tomorrow.

Parkour that makes you feel fast, clumsy, and hunted at the same time

Finding Frankie is built around movement. You run, jump, swing, slide, wall‑run, and fling yourself across gaudy deathtraps while trying not to become set dressing. When it clicks, the game nails that adrenaline rush: you chain a wall‑run into a jump, grab a bar, swing over a pit, land on a bouncing platform, and for a second you feel unstoppable.

Then you mistime a jump, whiff a grab, or clip a rail, and suddenly you’re flopping across foam like a panicked toddler while something in a mascot suit closes the gap.

The movement feels good most of the time — responsive, weighty enough, and just slippery enough to keep you nervous. It’s not as precise as a pure parkour sim, and some tighter sections will absolutely punish you for tiny mistakes, but that friction weirdly works for the horror. You never feel fully in control, and that’s the point.

Contestants as disposable content

One thing I appreciate: the game fully commits to the “game show as meat grinder” premise. You’re not a chosen hero. You’re a contestant. So is everyone else. People die. People get “eliminated.” The show moves on.

The announcer hypes you up like it’s all fun and games while the set design quietly screams that absolutely nothing here passed a safety inspection. Bodies, blood, damaged props, barely hidden carnage — the park feels like a place that used to be family‑friendly and then got rebranded by someone who thought, “What if The Running Man, but with cereal?”

It makes every run feel gross in a good way. You’re chasing prize money, clout, survival — and you can feel the show using you. That’s a strong thematic hook for a game that’s also asking you to nail the timing on a swinging bar.

Mascot horror done right (and loud)

On the horror side, Finding Frankie leans heavily into mascot horror. If you’ve played anything in the “haunted brand character” subgenre, you’ll recognize the DNA, but this game wraps it in a game‑show production style that gives it its own flavor.

The mascots and “hosts” aren’t just jump scare dispensers; they’re part of the world’s logic. They feel like performers trapped inside a show that went off the rails a long time ago. The result is less “boo, loud noise,” and more “oh, this whole system is rotten.”

Sound design does a lot of heavy lifting. Crowd noise, canned hype, distorted PA announcements, mascots shrieking from somewhere just out of sight — the audio keeps you on edge even when nothing’s technically happening. When it is happening, it gets appropriately chaotic.

Level design: somewhere between obstacle course and crime scene

The courses at Frankie’s Parkour Palace are the real draw. They’re laid out like party game arenas that got redesigned by a serial killer: trampolines over pits, swinging bars above water, moving platforms, foam pits that may or may not contain previous contestants — you get the idea.

When the level design is on, it feels fantastic. You see multiple paths and improvise routes mid‑run, chasing the line that feels just dangerous enough. The best sections give you that razor‑thin margin where you barely make a jump and immediately have to think about the next one.

There are rough edges — a few sections demand precision the engine doesn’t always support, and occasionally the readability of the environment suffers under the neon chaos — but taken as a whole, the park feels like a character: loud, hostile, and weirdly believable.

Xbox performance and feel

On Xbox, Finding Frankie holds up well. The framerate stays stable enough to keep your inputs reliable, which is non‑negotiable for a parkour‑driven game. Controls translate nicely to a gamepad; jumps, slides, and grabs all sit where your hands expect them to.

It’s not a technical showpiece, but it doesn’t need to be. What matters is clarity: can you read the course at a glance, feel your momentum, and react in time when the game decides to throw a swinging obstacle or a mascot at your face? Most of the time, yes.

Verdict: a vicious little game show that earns your anxiety

Finding Frankie is exactly the kind of game that looks like a gimmick from a distance and then quietly eats your evening. The horror works because the parkour works. The parkour works because the game show framing raises the stakes. And the whole thing hangs together because it never forgets that you’re not the star — you’re content.

If you like horror that doesn’t stop moving, if you enjoy parkour games that punish hesitation, and if the idea of a deadly obstacle course run by a cereal mascot sounds uncomfortably plausible to you, Finding Frankie on Xbox is absolutely worth your time.

Every now and then, a game drops into your lap that makes you think, “Alright, this’ll kill an hour,” and then suddenly you’re three coffees deep, emotionally invested, and yelling at your TV like it owes you money. Finding Frankie is exactly that kind of game — a scrappy, charming, occasionally unhinged mystery adventure that sneaks up on you with more heart than you expect.