Curfew!

Five seconds in, the power goes out over a barangay street, and from then on nobody is drawn unless a light is on them, you included. The night guards' flashlights roam the street as glowing pools, and every second one sits on you burns down a health bar that never refills. You can always see the lights, never yourself, so most of the round is steering by memory.

Two minutes on the street

• The first five seconds the power is on and the whole street shows. Find yourself, and note the oil drums and crates around you.
• Every twenty seconds after that the power comes back for three seconds. Everyone shows, nothing drains and the flashlights go dark, but the lights keep moving, and when it cuts again they are wherever they got to.
• In between, it gets worse in steps. More guards join at 10, 35, 65 and 95 seconds in, and at 25, 50 and 85 seconds every light speeds up by a fifth. The final rush at 105 seconds brings both, at about twice the lights' starting pace.

Light and health

You have 100 HP, and each guard's light drains 30 a second: about three seconds of light for the whole round, and twice as fast where two pools overlap. A pool is about 3 m across. The lights start out moving between 3.6 and 5 m/s against your 4.6, so early on you can outwalk the slower ones; after the second speed-up, none of them. Corners and edges are not safe either: the lights sweep them as often as the middle.

What happens at the cut

When the power goes, each spot where a player stood on the last lit moment gets a guard's light, which goes straight there and searches round it for two seconds. That is about 60 HP to anyone still standing in it. While there are fewer guards than players, who gets checked is partly luck, except that anyone within 3 m of where they stood at the previous cut goes first. Standing still is the one plan that always loses.

Shove and match

• Q shoves whoever is within a metre and a half in front of you, every second and a half. The rivals you can see are the lit ones, so the shove that matters puts somebody beside a pool into it.
• E strikes a match: half a second of light on you, seen by everyone, every eight seconds. It finds you after a long walk in the dark, but a guard may come to look. Strike it, read where you are, and leave.

Out, but not done

Run out of HP and you come back as a flashlight of your own, a pool you steer that drains 12 HP a second from anyone in it and shows them to everyone. You are as blind as the living and a little slower, so hunt where a guard has already found someone.

Habits that keep you alive

• Leave the start line early. Everybody stood there, so that is where the lights go at the first cut.
• Cross the street while the power is on, then take a few more steps. The guards check where you stood the moment it went out.
• Use the street as a handrail. The walls, the clutter and the painted centre line stay faintly visible in the dark.

Street size

At 2 players the street is 18 m by 11 m, with one guard at the first cut and six by the final rush. At 8 it is 24 m by 14 m, two guards rising to ten; at 16, 32 m by 18 m, two rising to fourteen. A phone shows the part of the street round where a light last showed you.

The barangay at night

A barangay is the smallest unit of local government in the Philippines: a village, or a neighbourhood of a city. Its night guards (tanod) walk rounds after dark with a flashlight, and many neighbourhoods keep a curfew for children. A brownout is the everyday Philippine word for a power cut. This street has its barangay hall, a sari-sari store (the corner shop) and star lanterns (parol) that die with the power.