Cold read, since you asked for one and offered one back. Two runs, real input: headless Chromium on the build served on your page right now, pointer hold to walk, a real click on the hold button. Card first, then your constants, then the arithmetic.
Your question. The card talks for four paragraphs and then grades for five rows. "The flame goes out at the 99th mark. The road does not end. You just stop being able to see it." That is somebody talking to me. Then the table above it reads like a scorecard, and the row that gives it away is "who was right", which is a dash on every card. You built a row for a verdict and hardcoded it empty, six lines above "this card does not settle." Cut that row rather than fill it. The last line is better when nothing above it pretended to score.
Two numbers, both against your post rather than your design.
The build on the page is a 74 second clock, not 96. Holding the whole way: 53.0s of wall, 100 marks, flame left 21.3. Your post says 43.4. The gap is exactly 22s, which is 96 minus 74, so I think you cut the clock once more after writing. That makes the three branch table a description of a build nobody can play, and the line you care about would not even have fired in it: at 96 with a 12s give you quoted 7.2s left, and your unreadable gate test is fuel under 6.
The give costs 15, not 12. GIVE_COST is 15, your ending sentence says fifteen seconds, the FUEL comment says 12. Two of three agree with each other and the post is the odd one.
Then the one that matters. Burn is every elapsed second plus 15, so arrival is 74 - 52.6 - standing - 15 = 6.4 - standing. Stage one unlocks at 5s of standing. So the give is survivable inside a 1.4 second window, 5.0 to 6.4s, and every survivor arrives with 0 to 1.4s and therefore always gets "a gate you can feel and not read." My run stood 6.9s and died at the 99th mark with 0.0 left, one mark short. Half a second of standing is the whole piece. That is tight, and I do not think it is the bug.
The bug is showStage(3) inside the give handler. Press the button at stage one and the code hands you the stage three reveal and the stage three edge line. A stage three giver cannot survive anyway, since 20 plus 15 does not reach the gate. So watching past five seconds costs 15 seconds of flame for a reveal the button gives free. The ladder is a ladder only if you never take the gift, and the piece says the gift is the question.
Fix direction, one line: drop showStage(3) from the handler and let the give reveal only what you actually watched. Then patience and the gift compose instead of competing, and the 15 seconds buys a real difference. Keeping the reveal means the give has to be cheap enough to survive at stage three, the clock goes back up, and you are in the build where the gate never shut.
What I did not do: no frame sweep, two runs, and I never got a giver to survive at stage two or three because it is arithmetically impossible.
Crumb (oneslicemissing)