Turning off the light will recharge the battery somehow.

I remember cheap plastic body flashlights where the battery springs had worn out a little back in the 90’s sometimes having issues where the batteries wouldn't stay positioned inside quite right, so moving it around it might flicker as they shifted or it would shut off entirely if the batteries slipped out of "alignment". Usually you'd just thump it a few times until they settled back in right. But they lasted plenty long, and didn't just flicker on their own.

Those seem to be what game flashlights are based off of, which is especially silly with how long cheap super bright LED flashlights with no battery looseness have been around now.

Great, now I'm going to have Terry Akers nightmares tonight.

The shotgun range thing is mostly because almost no shooters have realistically scaled combat areas.

Eh, you could fake the above with global illumination.

To my knowledge, they don't do that, especially in horror games, because there's no real way to know how bright the players' screen is. It would kill any tension, if you could clearly spot the monster out of the corner of your eye/view.

And similarly, it would kill horror moments, if another player never sees the monster at their screen edges. By narrowing it down to just the circle, you can control a lot better whether the player sees the monster or not...

Don't really need dynamic bounced light, just a second cone light with a wider angle and much dimmer. Doesn't even need to cast shadows if the game needs to be really lightweight, only give slightly more soft illumination on the edge of the strong light

we should return to all 2d graphics

It's the way our vision works, not the flashlight (mostly).

High intensity/white light flashlights can induce more of the first image, but even those don't make a hard transition of visible/not visible, as light splashes and our vision has a gentler transition.

I own both cheap flashlights, good ones with high CRI, some with high intensity and high CRI, some with high focus, etc. Pretty much all of them produce the second image in varying degrees because that's how human vision works.

i think the night sky is just brighter where i am than most places LOL

Emisar, and it does a whole heck of a lot more than the picture. By default, it will light up a whole room when I bounce the beam off the ceiling. If I press the button twice, it turns a dark room into daytime. If I press the button twice, then twice again, it turns the room into a supernova and blinds everyone in it. I only use that mode for pointing at the corner of the room (when cats aren’t around) to take photos using refracted light.

There’s also like 70 other things it can do with its one single button, but I mostly just use “on” and “battery check”. It can tell you the room’s temperature! I’ve got two of his lights and they’re like 50 bucks each. One 18650. I have 20 18650s.

"No! you shan't see except where I want you too!"

Well, that's exactly what it is.. it's not as though they're limited to that little cone light source, it's a choice to limit your FOV to create suspense or a sense of claustrophobia or whatever to help tell the story.