Bestiary
Drawn at their real sizes relative to each other, moving at the speed you'll actually see them. One torch is all the light there is down there, so this is about as good a look as you get.
That's you, from above, carrying the only light in the game. The walk cycle is paced off how far you've moved rather than the clock, so your feet stay in step at any speed. Including the panicky triple pace a dying torch drives you to.
100 px/s walking · up to 3× as the torch dies
It's you. The same seventeen frames with the colour drained out of them, gone cold, and never quite solid. It shambles. It doesn't chase.
A bright torch is what calls it over. Let the light burn down and it loses track of you, wanders to wherever it last saw you, and gives up five seconds later. What it costs you is your route, plus four seconds of torch if it catches up.
52 px/s · sees you from 11 cells at a full torch, none below half · touch costs 4 s
It stalks slower than you walk, so you can always leave. Then it stops dead, flares its eyes, screeches, and pounces faster than you can run. The warning is real. It picks where to jump when the screech starts, not when it jumps, so moving while it winds up is what makes the lunge miss.
Three things keep it off you, and none of them needs a button you don't already have: keep your torch above half, stand still long enough to lose it, or back onto a torch nobody has picked up yet.
stalks 138 px/s · lunges 420 · 0.9 s of warning · bite costs 6 s
Scenery, on purpose. It flits off when you come near, chirps, and does nothing else. It's there to make the cave feel lived in, and to be the thing you have to tell a hunter apart from, at the edge of a failing torch, in about half a second.
≈15 px of world · startles within 2.5 cells
Not a creature, but it's the other thing underfoot. Pools spread along the corridors five tiles at a time. Wading is 45% slower. It never blocks the way and never touches your torch. All it costs you is seconds, which near the end of a torch comes to the same thing.
0.55× speed · 1–6 pools a level · Infested adds 2
A mood isn't just a colour filter over the same cave. Each one hangs something in the air: spores over Infested's floods, dust in a Warren, iron in a Lodestone, ash where the torches all burned out. Your torch is the only thing lighting any of it, so you only ever see the bit you're standing in.
20–80 motes · a field 130 px across · lit by the torch only
Hunters and the Lost are both watching your torch, and they want opposite things from it. A full one keeps the hunters off you and brings the Lost. A dying one loses the Lost and commits the hunters, while the dark already has you running flat out.
So there's no way to hold your torch that solves the cave, and that's the point. Before the Lost turned up, "keep it topped up" was the whole answer, and an answer with no downside isn't really a choice.