Bestiary
Drawn at true relative size and animated at the speed you will actually see them at. The cave is lit by one torch, so this is roughly how much of any of it you get.
Seen from above, carrying the only light in the game. The walk cycle is paced off ground covered rather than time, so it stays in step with your footsteps at any speed — including the triple pace a dying torch drives you to.
100 px/s walking · up to 3× as the torch dies
It is you. The identical seventeen frames with the colour taken out — desaturated and cast cold, so it still reads as a figure rather than a silhouette, and never quite solid. It shambles. It does not chase.
A bright torch is what calls it. Let the light burn down and it loses you; it walks to the last place it saw you and gives up five seconds later. What it costs is your route, and four seconds of torch if it reaches you.
52 px/s · sees you from 11 cells at a full torch, none below half · touch costs 4 s
It stalks you 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 locks its aim when the screech starts, not when it jumps, so moving during the telegraph is what makes the lunge miss.
Three things keep it off you, and none of them is a new button: hold your torch above half, stand still long enough to break its track, or back onto a torch nobody has claimed yet.
stalks 138 px/s · lunges 420 · 0.9 s of warning · bite costs 6 s
Scenery, and deliberately so. It flits when you come near, chirps, and does nothing else. It is there to make the cave feel inhabited — and to be the thing a hunter has to be told apart from, at the edge of a failing torch, in the half second you get.
≈15 px of world · startles within 2.5 cells
Not a creature, but it is the other thing underfoot. Pools grown along the corridors five cells at a time. Wading is 45% slower. It never blocks the way and it never touches your torch — it only ever costs you seconds, which at the bottom of a burning torch is the same thing.
0.55× speed · 1–6 pools a level · Infested adds 2
A mood is not just a 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 — and it is lit by your torch and nothing else, so you only ever see the part of it you are standing in.
20–80 motes · a field 130 px across · lit by the torch only
Hunters and the Lost read the same thing about your torch and read it in opposite directions. A full torch keeps hunters off and brings the Lost. A dying one loses the Lost and commits the hunters — while the dark already has you running at three times your own speed.
So there is no setting on the torch that solves the cave, which is the point. Before the Lost existed, "keep the torch topped up" was the whole of threat management, and a strategy with no cost is not a decision.