HEADGATE

You are a resurveyor, sent to Sufferance to re-establish section corners that were lost in 1873. Where a monument still stands in both years, your transit sights through time. And when you re-stage the past, the present redraws under your hands.

A headgate is the structure that diverts water out of a river and into a ditch. In western water law it is the physical point at which a claim begins. There is one at the end of this route, and whether the town has any right to it depends entirely on what you decide happened in 1851.

What you actually do

In the present, 1899, you walk. Continuous eight-way movement over seventeen places of dry country. Eight obstacles sit on the road between you and the headgate, and each one tells you plainly what it costs you now: dollars, or days, or worse.

In the past, 1873, you drag. At a monument that survives into your year the screen splits. The past sits above, a live strip of the present below. You take hold of people, objects and weather with the cursor and you move them, and the strip redraws at frame rate under your hand. Nothing is real until you press C.

The redraw shows you the world changing. It does not tell you whether you have solved anything. That is the game. The picture and the paperwork sit on different facts, and working out how one reaches the other is what you are here to learn. There is no plan screen, no consequence preview and no simulate button, because every one of those would answer the question for you.

What you are spending

• Five reaches. One per commit, whatever you re-stage inside it. Moving a ledger and moving a whole season cost the same.
• 1873 costs one. 1851 costs three. The older year is worth more, and costs more than it is worth.
• Forty days of the dry. Travel, obstacles and commits all burn it. When it runs out the chapter ends wherever you are standing.
• $420 in scrip. The alternative to time travel is paying, and paying works.

You can finish this chapter without ever using the transit. It just costs you everything else.

Three endings, all real

• The water reaches Sufferance. You lift the chain off a gate that has been the town's since 1851 and nobody knew it.
• The town is abandoned. The gate opens, the water goes where the paper says it goes, and your plat becomes the only record the town was ever laid out.
• You take the railhead east. There is a freight east on the Thursday. The corners stay lost.

None of them is a failure screen. Roughly thirty to sixty minutes for a first run, and it is meant to be played more than once, because the second run is a different game.

Try it before you buy it

The free browser demo is chapter one up to the rail cut, about half the route, including the railhead monument. You reach the transit, re-stage 1873, and watch 1899 redraw before the demo stops. It is a real slice rather than a teaser, and it ends where the buying decision is honestly made.

The paid download is the whole chapter and all three endings, as a single portable Windows executable. It installs nothing, writes nothing outside its own folder, and needs no network connection.

Controls

Arrow keys or WASD walk · Z act, hold to work · C set · X leave · E change era · M mute

Everything else you need is drawn on screen.

What is under it

• Hand-written HTML5 canvas. No engine, no framework, no runtime dependencies.
• All ten JavaScript modules ship exactly as written, unminified and commented. A package you cannot audit is a package you have to take on trust.
• Every scene is composed at draw time from 48 authored terrain variants and their autotile masks, so the same place really is drawn twice, once for each year, from the same data.
• Art from seven first-party CSAF asset packs. Music and effects are procedural synthesis computed from a written score by our own code, so there is no sample library and no third-party licence anywhere in the build.

AI disclosure

This product is AI-written and this listing says so.

• Code — yes. Every line.
• Graphics — yes. The asset packs it draws from are AI-generated first-party CSAF packs, and the cover is generated illustration.
• Sounds — no. The music and effects are procedural synthesis, computed from a written score by our own code. No generative-audio model was involved at any point.
• Text & Dialog — yes. The prose, the obstacle text and all three endings are authored.

More from Core Systems Asset Factory: csaf.itch.io

More from CSAF

More games from the same studio:

• MOONWORT
• ANTIPOLE
• NOCTUARY
• THE BRASS ORRERY

Everything else we make is at csaf.itch.io.