Underlight

A top-down dungeon crawl built on a single number. You go down holding a torch with 100 units of fuel, and that one bar is three things at once:

• your light — the radius you can see is fuel × 2.2 pixels
• your health — a melee hit burns 12 of it, a trap 20, and at zero the light goes out and the run is over
• your money — every shrine upgrade is paid for in fuel

It drains 1.4 a second while you walk and 0.6 while you stand still, so stopping to think is affordable but never free. Every decision is the same decision: burn bright and see, hoard and survive, or spend and get stronger.

How it plays

• The dark is not a filter, it is the level. Enemies outside your radius are not drawn at all — not dimmed, not silhouetted, absent. The Lurker exists entirely because of that rule, and burning fuel to widen the circle is the only counter to it.
• Attacking is a flashbulb. The torch swing reaches 44 px; at low fuel your light has collapsed to 30. So the swing is longer than your sight, and the flare it throws for 0.1 s is how you find out what you just hit. If you have never swung blind, you have not played the bottom of the bar.
• Even dodging costs light. The roll is 0.22 s of invulnerability for 4 fuel. Nothing in this game is free, including getting out of the way.
• Shrines are a gamble, deliberately. One per floor, 18 to 30 fuel, against a perfect floor that nets about +5. Buying anything on floor one spends three floors of flawless play, and sometimes that is still the right call.
• The torch tells you the truth before the HUD does. The light jitters ±3 % at 8 Hz, and the jitter grows as the fuel falls. Below 10 the whole world desaturates except the flame. You will feel the run ending before you look at the number.

Five floors, then The Snuffer — which puts the room's light out and drains 6 fuel a second until you land a hit on it. Permadeath, no meta-progression, no carry-over: a good run is eight to twelve minutes and a bad one is over in three, and that is the point.