Ok full marks for story - right now I got as far as the garage and I believe I understand what the alternative ending might be. However I'm struggling a lot with the candle burn speed.
Suggestions: I'd like to finish the story but once your light gets low you're just not going to find any fuel, so the game is a bit of a high-pressure memory game at present. If you could tweak the burn speed I think that'd help a lot (I'd consider this a balance / bug fix so no issue doing it now). I'd even say halving the burn speed would be an idea. Also the time pressure means going and reading the fun stuff (turtles!!) is not really possible.
Other things: ahem, player's flashlight uses candles for fuel? I ignored the candles to begin with :) Oh yeah, a semi-bug - I actually found a candle somehow in the dark but got murdered a second later.
Otherwise very cool and congrats, I can see a lot of work went into this one.