Lighting difference from editor to build

[civic lynx]

I'm making a horror game where there are scenes that are supposed to be dark so that the player relies on a flashlight to be able to see. So it's supposed to be dark like how you will see in the editor view of the game.
In the editor the lighting looks fine and with the build my buddy ran it and things looked the same. Yet for me when I play the build the lighting looks a bit brighter and washed out.
I've used chatgpt to go through quite a number of things like the lighting and environment settings for baking. most lights are set to mixed. I tried Progressive CPU for baking lights, it's set to Lighting Mode Shadowmask, I set default quality settings to Ultra, adjusting my monitors display settings, updating graphics drivers, making sure I'm in a different scene when building, etc. Nothing has worked so far.
Any tips or help would be appreciated

It's hard to see in the pictures but there's definitely a noticeable difference for me.

[royal fog]

One red flag is that you seem to be comparing to the scene view only..? You should be comparing the game view to the build. There's totally possible to be differences between the scene view and what/how camera actually renders in game view/build.

[civic lynx]

in my case the game view looks exactly the same as my scene view.

[wary sail]

you should read the Player.log with dev build ON to see what's going on here

[vernal wind]

If the built application matches the editor / intended look for the friend of OP, but not for OP, that seems to exclude most potential issues with the build itself

It could be that a GPU driver software on your machine is set to tune the visuals of all programs it recognizes as games

I guess the OS could have a feature like that too

Another possibility is that if you have some logic for swapping quality levels based on user settings, these settings can persist locally on your device and have an effect even if you have not consciously changed them