Hove to Camden, October 1903. Fifty-eight miles of turnpike, a handcart, four people, and one kitten whose fever will not break.
The Oregon Trail's shape, laid over the road out of Sussex. You outfit at an apothecary and a corn merchant in Hove, pick a pace and a ration, and roll a day at a time up the London turnpike — Pyecombe, Handcross, Crawley, the Mole, Croydon, the Thames — while the road takes wheels, ponies, food and people off you.
The difference is what you are carrying. In the original the wagon is the point. Here the wagon is just the thing Biscuit is lying in, and she is a clock: her fever worsens every day you are out, faster if you march hard, slower if she is warm and fed. Fisik holds her. It does not cure her, it does less every time you give it, and it cannot lift her past a ceiling that only the green door in Camden clears.
Everything trades against everything. A forced march gets you there in nine days and costs Biscuit three points a day for the privilege. Bare rations save food and hollow out the family until somebody has to be left at an inn. Blankets are the only thing that slows the fever for free, and they are the cheapest thing on the outfitter's list — which is the closest thing this game has to a hint.
If you outfit badly you are not finished. A day's work at a farm puts shillings in the tin at the cost of a day on the clock, the chemists in Crawley, Redhill and Croydon will sell you another bottle, and there are people on that road who will not take anything for a blanket. The poorest family scores three times what the richest one does, and it is the road worth walking.
This is a browser prototype in the same sense that Alley Cat is: the systems are real and the presentation is a placeholder. The intended build is the same 1903 film-stock look as the rest of the picture, with the road as a moving plate behind a locked-off camera, hand-drawn intertitles for every event, and a proper ending reel. It saves your best runs on your own machine and asks for nothing.