Barely escaping a horde of monsters, our protagonist finds a tower with a strange glowing light on top. This is one of the last sources of light to exist, so he decides to go in to collect it.
The game is filled to the brim with spaghetti code, the level design is jank, there's probably a game-breaking bug somewhere, but it's a finished product

left and right/a and d to walk
down/s to talk to historian, open chests, and access the lockbox
type in the lockbox's respective password to pass
you cannot open chests when you already have an item
c or u to read papers
x to stop reading or exit out of the lockbox
(don't worry, none of the passwords will have the letter x)
z to burn or accept historian's deal

burning a paper increases a torch's timer. this is important, if the last torch runs out of time, it's instant death for you. matter of fact this should be the only way you can die in game, if you end up dying another way (note: dying in the middle of nowhere likely means that a torch ran out of time off-screen)