I adore this little experience.

It's such a fun game to run through, atmosphere being on point, cold, dreary, dark.
Sure it's a bit stiff on combat but for 5 bucks, this is a nice way to support the dev and their work.
Definitely need more games like this

WHERE DO I START

If you are looking for a cry of fear inspired game you are out of luck, because this game feels more like a "cof at home" in the worst way possible.

The gameplay is mid af, when i was first wandering through the first zone of the game i immediately realized that you couldn't dodge or block (first red flag btw), but i decided to not say anything, maybe once i was introduced to the combat itself i would gain access to a dodge or block. WRONG, you wanna know what the game introduced me when the first enemy appeared? the game introduced the fact that not only you have infinite life (such a great mechanic for """survival horror""" game right :3) BUT ALSO THAT EVERY SINGLE ENEMY ENCOUNTER WOULD BE A DAMAGE RACE. there's no way to dodge or block, so literally the best strat is to find the enemy and spam click like a dumbass. Yeah, really good gameplay dude, you should be proud of yourself.

The first boss fight is literally screaming "I SWEAR TO GOD IM NOT A SAWER RIP OFF" at the top of their lungs. You gotta fight a fire fighter with an absurd amount of life, a single slow af attack thats impossible of not dodging by cassually walking out of the way. So the fight goes like this: you gotta skilfully walk out of the way, and while the firefighter is getting up from attacking you can get 2 hits on the air tank on their back, repeat this for a stupid amount of time until you kill them.
If you played cry of fear you know that the sawer is also the first boss of the game, also has only one attack, and can also be damaged when hitting its back, the difference is that thanks to the fast swings of its chainsaw, the fact that you could dodge, and having to get some hits before exposing its weak point you had a simple yet fun boss fight, a fight where yeah, this dude only has one attack, but since you have a character that can do more things than just walking and running the devs had to make the sawer attack a lot faster, giving the player an actual reason to engage on the game's mechanics, and as a lil bonus, if you are quick enough with your dodges, you can actually kill him knife only, saving up your pistol bullets for later! But of course pyromaniac is way too good for good game desing... moving on.

The parkour section its forgetable, i literally forgot about it, and only remembered because the screenshots i took of its awful way to actually trick the player. First of all, i'll get this out of the way, but it truly feels like the devs of this thing only added zones like the parkour section, the forest and mine sections because they were on cry of fear. Now onto the actual parkour, it's mid, you just gotta jump from building to building, but right at the end you will find an arrow drawn with blood, pointing towards an open window, the problem? not only the window is higher than your jumping spot, but also there's a huge gap in between the two buildings... but then you can see that there's a burn barrel down in the street, and beside it there's a matress. obviously you'd die if you jumped onto the matress from that height, but this game is presenting me with an impossible looking jump, and with a fricking matress right below it. so yeah, i let myself fall and died. . . *sigh* whatever, i try again, get to the jump, and out of options, i try to make it to the window, only for the game to hide the fact that the MC got teleported towards the window with a cutscene of him barely making the jump... dang thats pretty lucky am i right????

The forest zone is okay, and tbh i kinda enjoyed it more than the forest of cof, where its so easy to get lost. but you know whats funny? the fact that you find a bunker that leads towards a nighmare section! wow! what a coincidence! cry of fear had the same concept in its forest section!

The mine section is the last of this lil sections i'll mention, tbh i already forgot where it takes place, but if you played the extra campaings of cry of fear you'll know that there is a random mine section there too -.-

the rest of the game is just boring damage racing against enemies, and walking around a straight path, the only big difference the gameplay gets happens when you get the gun. this is such an underwhelming weapon, unlike the vast majority of games in existence, headshots mean nothing, if the enemy takes 4 bullets to go down, it doesnt matter where you shot them, so just go for the chest so you miss the least amount of bullets. (that's also the best strat for the 10 rounds of enemies you gotta take out nearing the end of chapter 4)

when you finally get to the end of chapter 4 you wake up from a confusing car chase sequence. Once you regain control of this dumbass names nikolas you'll realize that you only have around 20% of your stamina... yes, this was only added to the game because cry of fear did the same when nearing the end of the game, ugh. Whatever, once you finally reach your apartment, you'll realize that your apartment building looks exactly the same as the one from the start of the game (yes they also stole the idea of the random apartment building that you find in cry of fear in the beggining of the game, ends up being where simon lived...). Once you finally get to your place you'll find a tape that turns out to be the exposition of why nikolas is going through all this! (yes same thing happened in cry of fear, just change the tape with simon's book). turns out "blah blah blah pyromania blah blah my life sucks ass now so i'll take my own life by burning this whole place down, im sorry about the ppl i'll take with me tho" . . . *sigh* nikolas runs to the bathroom and eek! EVIL VERSION OF MC COVERED IN BLOOD OMG GUYS, LOOKS LIKE WE'LL HAVE TO HAVE AN AWESOME FINAL FIGHT AGAINST OURSELVES TO GET OUT OF THIS NIGHTMARE! . . . you know what? its obvious by the way i phrased it that this is just a copy of the ending of cry of fear. the final fight its okay thankfully, the concept of having to blow the candles before damaging ̶b̶o̶o̶k̶ ̶s̶i̶m̶o̶n̶ THE EVIL PYROMANIA its fun i guess. but the whole situation just feels like someone who played cry of fear, really liked it, but didn't get the story or why the gameplay (sometimes) worked... once you beat his ass you can either kill him or not, killing him grants you the bad ending where you just die, and letting him live make nikolas say "getting rid of my pyromania wont fix anything i've done, i'll choose to be better" (???). So this dumbass wakes up in a hospital bed (not a single burn in his body mind you) from where he escapes and it's implied the cops got his ass in jail... what a big wast of my time and money was this game.

Ending thoughts? just play cry of fear, i know this review is making me sound like cof's biggest fan girl but that couldn't be further from the truth, i think cof its an okay and sometimes good game that has a LOT of flaws, ngl the best thing about it is the story and ost, the gameplay has a good foundation but there are a lot of sections where the devs just dont get their own mechanics, leading to frustrating moments.
Sadly pyromaniac is just cry of fear but worst in every way possible, the gameplay is bad, the combat encounters are just boring damage races, the two boss fights are bad and mid respectively, and the story feels like someone wanted to make their own cry of fear inspired story, but ended up with a product that's just absent from a story the vast majority of the time, and when it finally has smth to tell its either a plea for the player to feel empathy for nikolas, or straight up plagiarism of cof's story but change simon's declining mental health with FIRE GOES BRRR... This is probably the worst game i've ever played, and i've never felt so insulted of "being" thanked for playing the game once you reach the end of the credits, that actually felt like a slap to the face. Just play cof and ignore this slop of a game, cof it's free and its way better, and that comes from someone who has trashed on cof in the past...

Okay, to be clear, this game isn't terrible. So if this review sounds overly harsh, apologies, it's me being very critical and trying to set expectations for this game. Let me also preface this with two things, I've played an obscene amount of horror games, but I've never played Cry of Fear which seems to be the common comparison in other reviews and the dev states has been a big inspiration for this game. There's no spoilers in this review, but I'll vaguely point out some things that I didn't enjoy to protect your experience. All that aside, here goes...

Pyromaniac has a handful of things going for it. The visuals are pretty solid as long as you dig that analog lo fi vibe. The horror elements are...good? I think they're good. It's hard for me to tell these days. I think I'm just dead inside, but enemies kind of pop up unexpectedly which is cool. The variety of little game mechanics or segments are neat.

The bad. Okay this part is only a little goofy, but it's still just something I found slightly disappointing, this game is called Pyromaniac. You have a lighter. You will not be setting anything on fire really. Like...tea lights. That's...cool. I tried to solve all my problems by setting them on fire (IN GAME) but alas, you can't.

Okay joking aside, one thing this game does that a lot of horror games do is lean into poor combat. The melee amounts to very little more than stand still and whack things until they're dead. There's no dodge, no strong/light attacks, no parry, block, nothing. There's even some gunplay. It makes no difference where you shoot enemies. It's just shoot 3 times and move on. Like...I know action games are relatively boring on their own, but at least most of their mechanics are good, clean, balanced, which are things we take for granted. But they're tuned. In this game, they are certainly not dynamic or satisfying. I don't mind combat, but it needs to be to the expectation of what we've come to expect or at least do not make it part of the game's core experience.

The story. So for awhile the story is very nearly nonexistent. You're just a guy with no memory in a town. Which part of what makes these kinds of stories fail is that you're a blank slate. Nothing around you has any meaning, so unless the game gets the player to start asking questions like "what on earth is going on here? Is this real? Am I stumbling upon a crime? Am I being hunted?" or gives you a sense of urgency, it doesn't really work. Later on you might start asking yourself some of these questions, but in the first 3/4's of the game, I was just kind of going through the motions. I nearly quit the game from just not being engaged enough with it, but I figured I was close to finishing it. The story kind of presents plot points as if they were twists? But I don't think they were at all. It was very, very obvious so when the game does a dramatic "reveal" I was confused until I realized I think the game thought this was a twist.

The voice acting is....not great. I get it though, there's time/budget constraints so just tackling it is really the main option. There's just an overly hoarse kind of "gruff" voice that sounds like it's trying too hard to be like a noir voice over that's just not working. Honestly, I don't think this game necessarily needs it. But this combined with the writing just makes the script and voice acting feel very immature. To be fair, I mean this is to my knowledge, the dev's first game, but taken at face value, this is very rough around the edges compared to a solid foundation the game is built on.

Overall, the game isn't hopeless. People enjoy it and that's great. What the things I feel like this game needs in order to be a good game for me personally TLDR;
Better combat or less combat centric
More compelling story. Sense of urgency, more intrigue, more connection to the main character
Better voice acting or none. The game doesn't use a lot of voice acting so it seems unnecessary
Let me set fire to my problems (in game)