HEADGATE: A Time Travel Western, Free Demo
A game from Core Systems Asset Factory. Genre: Adventure, Puzzle. Paid; free browser demo on the page.
HEADGATE: A Time Travel Western, Free Demo is a game, paid, with a free browser demo on the store page.
HEADGATE is a time travel western in 17 places and 3 endings: a resurveyor re-stages 1873, and the present redraws. The first half is free in your browser. 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 on what you decide happened in 1873 and 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 strip of the present below. You take hold of what stood there, a bond book, a water barrel, a survey camp, a corner post, and you move it. The strip cuts to whichever place the piece in your hand acts on, which is often somewhere else entirely, and it recomposes the moment you set that piece down.
Nothing is real until you press C. The redraw shows you the world changing.
AI disclosure, as the store page states it: AI Assisted, Code, Graphics, Text
Paid · free browser demo on the page · Get it on itch.io. Files, screenshots and the full description are on the store page.