Ritual Beats

Ritual Beats is a four-lane rhythm game the whole room plays at once. Everyone stands in the side galleries of a sunken temple, plays the same chart to the same drum, and is ranked on a single number. Nobody can shove you and there's nothing to dodge. A round comes down to how close to the line your presses land, and to holding the long notes all the way.

Lanes

Runes slide down four lanes toward a gold strike line, and each lane has its own key: Q for the scarab, W for the eye, E for the sun and R for the ankh. Space and the mouse button play nothing. On a phone, lanes 1 and 2 sit under your left thumb and lanes 3 and 4 under your right.

A rune is in view for five beats, a little over two seconds, before it reaches the line. The drum holds 136 beats a minute for the whole round, and the backing track is locked to it, so a press on the beat you hear is a press on the line.

The song

Each round is a piano arrangement of either Pachelbel's Canon or the first movement of Vivaldi's Winter, picked at random, with about 85 seconds of music in a 90-second round. Each song has one fixed chart and everyone plays the same one. Both build through sections, with quicker runs, a quieter stretch around the halfway mark and a climax late on. Long notes arrive as hold beams: a rune with a long tail behind it. The Canon opens with eight of them before the first quick notes.

Scoring

A tap is judged on how far from the line it lands:

• PERFECT, within about 0.04 seconds: 150 points
• EXCELLENT, within about 0.1 seconds: 100
• GOOD, within about 0.17 seconds: 60
• BAD, caught but further off: 20

The window opens about a quarter of a second before the line and shuts less than a fifth of a second after it. A press with no rune in its window does nothing at all, so drumming along between notes costs you nothing.

A hold is judged on when you pick it up, then pays for every moment the key stays down, then pays a bonus when the end of the beam reaches the line. Let go in the last quarter of the beam and it still counts, for a smaller bonus. Let go before that and the bonus is gone.

The combo

Every four clean hits in a row raise the flame on your brazier a step, up to six steps. A BAD, a dropped hold or a rune that goes past unhit puts it back down. The combo is for show: it doesn't multiply anything. A miss costs that note's points and nothing more, so one slip is never worth rattling yourself over.

Playing it well

• Holds are where the points are. A two-beat hold kept to the end is worth about three perfect taps. Keep it held while you tap the other lanes.
• Pick up a hold you came in late on. A pick-up well after the head is judged BAD and resets the combo, but the beam still pays for every moment you hold it, plus the finish.
• Lean early rather than late. The window reaches further before the line than after it. A press well before the line still catches the rune as a BAD; a press just as far after it is a plain miss.
• Learn the two charts. A round is always one of the same two songs, note for note. By your second Canon you know where its holds and its fast runs are.
• Read the lane, press on the drum. Two seconds is plenty to see what's coming. Let the beat you hear decide the moment of the press.

If you'd rather type a phrase and land one big beat, try Pharaoh's Groove.