Sacred Sequence

Sacred Sequence is two tests back to back. First you stand perfectly still and remember a run of colours. Then you sprint round a ring of floor pads with everyone else doing the same thing, and one wrong step sends you back to the beginning. A good memory gets you round. Knowing the ring is what gets you round first.

Four rites

A round is four rites, each a brand-new sequence rather than the last one with a rune added. No rune ever shows twice in a row.

• Rite 1: 3 runes, then a 12-second race.
• Rite 2: 4 runes, 12.5 seconds.
• Rite 3: 5 runes, 13 seconds.
• Rite 4: 6 runes, 14 seconds.

While the obelisk speaks, your feet and your skills are locked and your camera swings round to face it. Each rune lights for about two seconds, slightly quicker each rite, with a short dark beat between flashes. Every pad of the rune being shown lights up and the rest go dark, and the status line builds the sequence as coloured dots. The dots vanish when the gong strikes.

During the race your progress shows above your skill buttons. A race ends about a second after everyone has finished.

Points

Finishing a rite pays by order: 100 for first, then 60, 30 and 15, and 10 for everyone else who finishes. A rite you don't finish pays nothing. The round is ranked on the total across all four, so a slow rite is recoverable and an unfinished one is the expensive mistake.

The ring

The four runes are the yellow sun, the red eye, the blue scarab and the green lotus, and they repeat round the ring in that order all the way round. From any pad, every other rune is one or two pads away, in one direction or the other. Learn the order once and every step of a sequence becomes "one along" or "two along" rather than a search.

The ring grows with the lobby but the gap between pads stays the same. At up to 4 players there are 8 pads, two of each rune. With 5 players there are 12, and with 9 or more there are 16, four of each. The obelisk's base is a wall, so nobody cuts straight across the middle.

Shove and Vault Dash

Both work only during the race.

• Q, Temple Shove (every 1.5 seconds). Knocks a rival within reach away from you and stuns them for most of a second. A stunned player's steps don't count until it wears off.
• E, Vault Dash (every 4 seconds). Half as fast again for under half a second. Save it for a two-pad run.

Right-drag turns the camera, and your movement follows the view.

Habits that win rites

• A wrong pad costs a lot. It stuns you for a second and sends you back to step 1, however far along you were. If you've lost the sequence, pause for a beat rather than guess.
• Mind the pad in between. Going from one pad to another two along, the straight line passes close to the pad between them, and from 9 players up it runs right over it. Stepping on it counts as a wrong rune, so curve inside it, toward the obelisk.
• A pad that just counted is locked. For a moment after someone's correct step, that pad ignores everybody. Chasing a rival onto their pad wastes that moment. Use another copy of the rune, or wait on it and it counts when the lock lifts.
• Don't end a race on a pad. When the next gong strikes, the pad you're standing on doesn't count for you, and stepping off and back on doesn't either. Finish on the ring between two pads, with a neighbour close on either side.
• A shove is worth a pad. Its stun costs a rival roughly the time it takes to run from one pad to the next. Save it for someone about to beat you to the pad you need.