How odd you mention that.. I'd already considered torches really early on.. They were played with for a while, but eventually abandoned!
As good as the scaling is, it's slow. If you then add lighting effects, the whole game grinds to a sluggish bore.. Or at least it does on my "If it works on this, folk'll be happy" testbed.. A celeron!
Or, at least, that's the whole "lighting with a torch" thing.. working out where the torch is, what'll light up, and then pixel-based recolouring.. It all takes its toll pretty quickly, even in such a small resolution. (Such is the drawback of Blitz Basic's Pixel stuff)
The other way to do it is to have a room that's black until you hit a switch, or enter with a torch.. But.. I felt that was cheating.
If I was going to do it, I'd do it properly.
Maybe sometime in the future when we all have 17Ghz machines
