How to Fix The Crimson Hunt Companion Flashlight Toggle Glitch: Complete Guide
I’ve sunk a stupid number of hours into survival horror, and the genre has one golden rule: the dark should scare you because the game says so, not because a script broke. The Crimson Hunt from indie studio Farelas nails the atmosphere. It’s a rotting Victorian mansion crawling with the last of some ancient vampire bloodlines, you’re armed with limited resources, and the whole thing wears its Resident Evil: Revelations and Alone in the Dark influences proudly.
You play Victoria, a veteran hunter cleaning house in the shadows. Tagging along is Eleanor, a young woman who was locked up in that mansion and now has every reason to want out alive. Light is basically a resource here. Corridors are pitch black, the big halls swallow everything, and you’re constantly asking yourself whether that shape ahead is a coat rack or a fanged problem.
Which is why the flashlight bug is so nasty. It hits the one system the game leans on hardest.
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The Feature That Started It All
Here’s the setup. A patch gave Eleanor some brains in single-player. Hold right-click on mouse (or the left trigger on a controller) to aim, and Eleanor pulls out her flashlight and points it exactly where you’re looking. No babysitting, no button prompts. On paper, it’s a great idea. She stops being a meat shield you drag around and starts acting like an actual partner.
When it works, it feels fantastic. You raise your gun, her beam snaps onto the doorway, and suddenly you can see the thing that’s about to eat your face.
When it doesn’t, you get what the community calls the companion flashlight toggle glitch, and it makes the mansion feel less like a horror game and more like a dial-up connection dying in real time.
Four Flavors of Broken
Players have reported the bug showing up in a few distinct ways. I’ve put them side by side so you can figure out which one you’re fighting:
| Variant | What You’ll See | Likely Trigger |
|---|---|---|
| Perpetual Darkness | Eleanor never lights up, even when you’re aiming into a black room | Toggle state stuck as ‘on’ while nothing actually deploys |
| Infinite Loop Strobe | Flashlight flickers on and off rapidly, seizure-adjacent | Rapid aim spam or conflicting pathfinding orders |
| Desynced Beam | Light points at the ceiling or a wall, ignoring your crosshair | Aim data not syncing with her torso animation |
| Input Freeze | Cursor gets released like a menu is open, no aiming or shooting | Toggle script locking input, mostly on keyboard and mouse |
The freeze variant is the worst by a mile. Getting jumped by something with fangs while your cursor floats around like you’re browsing settings is a special kind of humiliation.
Interesting detail from the forums: keyboard and mouse players get hit by the freeze far more often than controller players. If you’re on a pad, you’re probably fine on that front.
Why It Happens (The Nerdy Bit)
I’m not a dev, but the community has pieced together a decent picture, and it makes sense once you see it.
Eleanor runs on a state machine. Her main states are Idle, Follow, Flee, Interact, and Assist. The flashlight isn’t its own state. It’s an overlay script running on top of whatever she’s doing at that moment.
When you aim, the game fires a raycast from your camera to find where you’re pointing. It then tells Eleanor to turn her upper body toward that spot and play the flashlight-on animation.
Now imagine Eleanor is mid-jump off a ledge, opening a door, or flinching from a ghoul’s hit. The ‘turn on the light’ message shows up before that animation finishes. The script says ‘flashlight active.’ The character model never actually raises the light. The game thinks everything’s fine, Eleanor is standing there empty-handed, and the two never reconcile until something forces a fresh evaluation.
Quick taps of right-click, or taking damage while aiming, make this far more likely. You’re basically handing the state machine two contradictory orders and letting it sort it out badly.
The Fixes, Ranked by How Well They Work
Farelas hasn’t shipped a proper rewrite of the companion loop yet, so we’re on community duct tape for now. Here’s the lineup.
Fix 1: Make Eleanor Do a Co-op Interaction
This is the fastest fix, and it doesn’t make you quit the game. The idea is to force her into a high-priority animation that steamrolls the stuck flashlight script.
- Find something that needs both of you: a two-person heavy door or a dual lever setup.
- Hit the interact key (E on keyboard, or the matching face button on controller).
- Let the entire animation play. Don’t cancel it, don’t wander off early.
- Walk into open space, hold right-click, and see if she lights up.
Nine times out of ten, this clears the stuck toggle. It’s my go-to.
Fix 2: Refresh Your Inputs
If your cursor got unbound or the game seems confused about your controls, make it rebuild the link.
- Tap Escape right after the glitch. This flushes the aim registers.
- Go to Options → Controls.
- Switch to controller support, then flip back to Keyboard and Mouse.
- For extra insurance, rebind Aim to a different key, save, resume, aim once, then bind it back to right-click.
It’s tedious, but it works well for the freeze variant.
Fix 3: The Visibility Toggle and Full Reload
This one sounds like superstition, and I rolled my eyes too. But Steam users swear by it, and the logic holds up: you’re flushing cached character model data.
- Open your inventory and character sub-menus.
- Find the helmet, armor, or weapon visibility options and flip one (where your version has them).
- Make a manual save at a safe room or checkpoint.
- Quit all the way out to the title screen. A quick reload won’t cut it.
- Load the save you just made.
That clears the RAM tied to active models and their items, which resets Eleanor’s flashlight logic. It costs you a few minutes, but it’s reliable.
Fix 4: Sort Out Steam Remote Play Conflicts
If you’re playing split-screen or using Remote Play with a friend, the culprit is almost always controller ID confusion. The game can assign Player 1 and Player 2 to the same input device, so Eleanor’s flashlight commands end up fighting Victoria’s movement.
- Press Shift + Tab to open the Steam Overlay.
- Open the Remote Play panel.
- Check who’s assigned to what. Keyboard and mouse should belong to Player 1 only. Player 2 gets the controller.
- If both of you are still sharing one input line, disable the guest’s keyboard/mouse option entirely.
Fix 5: Cap Your Frame Rate and Turn On V-Sync
Farelas tied some physics and animation timing to engine speed, so a monster frame rate can make script threads run faster than animations can keep up. That’s how you get the toggle firing before the arm’s even moved.
- Enable V-Sync in the in-game graphics menu, or
- Set a hard 60 FPS cap through the Nvidia Control Panel or AMD Radeon Software.
- If combat is chugging, turn down heavy post-processing. Lag spikes mid-fight are a major trigger for the desync.
Fix 5 is the only preventive one on this list. The others are cures, and this one lowers the odds you’ll need them.
Quick Comparison
| Fix | Effort | Best For | Restart Needed? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Co-op interaction | Very low | Perpetual Darkness, Desynced Beam | No |
| Input refresh | Low | Input Freeze | No |
| Visibility toggle and reload | Medium | Stubborn cases | Yes, to title screen |
| Remote Play separation | Medium | Split-screen and Remote Play | No |
| FPS cap and V-Sync | Low | Prevention, Strobe | No |
How to Avoid Triggering It in the First Place
A few habits from my own runs and from what other players report:
- Don’t mash right-click. Deliberate aim, hold, release.
- Avoid aiming while Eleanor is mid-animation, especially ledge drops, doors, and reactions to hits.
- Save often in safe rooms. If the bug hits, you can reload without losing much.
- Keep your frame rate locked before you start a session, not after the bug shows up.
None of this makes you immune, but it noticeably cuts the frequency.
Where Farelas Goes From Here
For an indie studio, Farelas has been decent about listening. Earlier on, they worked on ally AI responsiveness, including cases where Eleanor would just stand there instead of helping stun enemies. The flashlight-aim mechanic itself came straight from players asking for better navigation help. That’s a good sign, because bugs in a feature the community asked for tend to get fixed faster.
If you want a real fix sooner, help them out. Post your crash logs and system specs on the official Steam discussion boards or the game’s itch.io page. The most useful detail is whether the bug happened in a solo run or during local split-screen, since that points straight at the state machine conflicts. Vague ‘it’s broken’ posts don’t give a dev anything to work with.
Final Verdict
The Crimson Hunt is a moody, well-built survival horror game with a genuinely clever companion idea, and this bug is a real shame because it hits the very thing that makes the game feel good. It’s annoying, but it’s not a run-killer. The co-op interaction reset and the manual save-and-reload cover most cases, and a locked frame rate keeps things stable.
Until Farelas patches the companion loop for good, keep those two tricks in your back pocket, save often, and try not to spam that aim button. Eleanor will get her light back, and you can go back to being properly scared of the right things.
