Don't be too hard on yourself! You only had a week and you really accomplished a lot in that time and it's a very distinct roguelike. I can also see this would have been tricky to design because your survival horror theme benefits from a bit of opacity in the systems and mystery as to what's going on. But yeah, a more player friendly on ramp would undoubtedly increase your potential audience a bit. A lot of 7DRL's have accessibility issues like this though. My collaborator this year, James, has a friend he uses to give his entries a test around Day 6 and often gets some good feedback on accessibility from that.
Re the torch, I was often in the tall grass where the torch doesn't do much so what I was missing is that you are in fact winding the torch, which gradually increases the range. There might also be a bug here because sometimes winding seemed to not respond to the key press even though it looks like it should.
I plan to give it one more session this weekend and hopefully I'll at least get to the last level. I still haven't figured out how fear works yet either so hopefully will sort that out too.
Cheers!