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Risk of Rain 2: How to Unlock the Acolyte in Hallowed Concepts

by · · 6 min read
Risk of Rain 2: How to Unlock the Acolyte in Hallowed Concepts
Image: 2K Games

If you bought Risk of Rain 2’s Hallowed Concepts DLC and can’t find the Acolyte on the survivor select screen, you’re not missing a button: she’s the one new survivor in the expansion you have to earn through an in-game chain. The Enforcer, the other new face, is unlocked the moment you own the DLC and enable it; he gets his own separate guide.

The Acolyte’s chain runs through the new Hallowed Concepts content (the N’tormat curio, the Trials of N’kuhana, and the Anima Harvester at the end). Below is the full path as the Destructoid walkthrough by Arka Sarkar walks it, plus everything the official Steam Community Dev Diaries say about her kit. The Destructoid guide is the most detailed public record of the steps we could find; the official Steam launch post confirms the Acolyte is the unlockable survivor but does not list the steps themselves. If Hopoo patches the chain, the community wiki and the RoR2 Discord update fastest.

What to do before you start the unlock run

Two things make the chain much smoother if you set them up at the start of a fresh run:

  • Have the DLC toggled on in the main menu. Without Hallowed Concepts enabled, the N’tormat curio, the Bazaar gong, and the Anima Harvester encounter won’t appear, and you’ll just be running the base game. Per the DLC’s Steam description, only one player in a co-op lobby needs to own the DLC for the new monsters, stages, and items to appear for everyone, but each player who wants to select the new survivors on their own account has to own it themselves.
  • Make sure you have at least one pure healing item by the time you reach the Anima Harvester. Rarity doesn’t matter (a common Medkit will do), but the trade the Acolyte asks for at the end of the chain only accepts a true healing item, not a damage or utility pickup. If you don’t have one, the chain can technically continue but you’ll have to back out and find one to seal the unlock.

You don’t need to start the run as a specific character. The unlock lives in the run, not on a particular survivor, so pick whoever you find most comfortable for a Teleporter clear.

The unlock chain, step by step

The order below is what the Destructoid guide lays out. We’ve kept the same order and added context from the official Dev Diaries where the steps touch on documented game systems.

  1. Get the N’tormat curio and at least one N’tormat Page. The N’tormat is the new curio introduced by Hallowed Concepts (described in Dev Diary #1 and the DLC store description). N’tormat Pages drop from Wake events and from completing Trials of N’kuhana, per Destructoid. Trials are the more reliable source; Wake events are rarer and partly luck-based.
  2. Open a Trial at the Bazaar Between Time. Find the Bazaar (a returning late-stage hub), drop down into the pit, and ring the gong. Ringing the gong starts a Trial of N’kuhana. Per Dev Diary #3 – Trials of N’kuhana, gongs are left by the followers of N’Kuhana in the new stages; the Bazaar’s is the most reliable early one.
  3. Complete a Teleporter event at the Shrine of Descent, with the N’tormat and at least one page in your inventory. Destructoid flags this as the hardest gate in the chain: Teleporter bosses hit hard on every difficulty, so don’t try this on a weak build. The Shrine of Descent is the trigger condition for the boss-rush pocket realm that comes next.
  4. Defeat the Teleporter boss. Once the boss is down, a new portal opens at the stage. Step through it before the stage ends.
  5. In the Ritual Portal arena, climb the ramps and interact with the console. This is the start of a boss-rush pocket realm. Waves of bosses will spawn, including the Anima Harvester at the end. This is the Soulbound Threshold‘s spiritual cousin, though the Acolyte chain’s version is a separate fixed arena, not the chained Soulbound Threshold from the Trials mode.
  6. Survive the boss waves until the Anima Harvester appears, then kill it. The Anima Harvester is the named boss of the unlock chain, per Destructoid.
  7. Find the Acolyte on the ground near the exit portal and give her the healing item you brought. She joins your survivor roster. The trade works with any healing item of any rarity; what’s required is that it heals.

If any step stops working after a patch (the trigger moves, the boss changes, the trade item changes), the community wiki’s Acolyte page is the fastest public record. We could not find an official source that re-lists the unlock chain in full, so treat the Destructoid walkthrough as the canonical version until Hopoo publishes one.

What the Acolyte actually does in a run

The kit comes from the official Dev Diary #4 – Acolyte and Enforcer and the Gematsu launch coverage of the Gearbox Publishing press release. The dev diary is the most detailed public source, and we’ve kept its phrasing where it’s the cleanest description.

  • Passive – N’Kuhana’s Grace. A portion of the health the Acolyte loses in a fight isn’t gone for good; it’s banked in a reserve pool. Incoming healing is also diverted into that same pool. She can spend the reserve later while she’s still in the fight. The trade-off is built in: she has to take damage to bank anything, and her effective HP behaves more like a wave than a flat bar.
  • Primary – Glaive combo. Three-hit melee string with the glaive. Mid-swing, sprint to lunge forward through the target, or jump to launch the enemy upward. The Dev Diary explicitly tells you to keep the combo moving, so a defensive Acolyte is a dead Acolyte.
  • Secondary – Bola Throw. A ranged pull that drags the soul out of whatever it hits. Use it when a target is just out of glaive range or when you want to yank a dangerous enemy into the middle of the fight.
  • Utility – ??? (deliberately blank). The Dev Diary #4 left this slot empty in the public version, and we won’t fill it in for Hopoo. The middle slot is the one place the developer has chosen not to detail yet, which suggests the kit might still be in flux or that they want players to discover it themselves.
  • Special – Sacrifice. Marks an enemy and channels the power of the Death God through it for a massive burst of damage. Each kill builds conviction, and the Dev Diary teases that the more conviction the Acolyte banks, the more the special escalates. The end of the dev diary leaves the escalation deliberately unclear.

Our read: the Acolyte plays as a melee-range scalper who banks damage to spend it back later. The glaive combo is the bread and butter, Bola Throw is your ranged reset, and Sacrifice is your burst window. If you like high-mobility characters who have to manage a resource pool during a run (think a glass-cannon Risk of Rain 2 take on Vampire Survivors-style health banking), she’s a fit. If you like standing in one place and tanking, the Enforcer is your survivor; see the Enforcer unlock guide.

A short note on the Acolyte’s place in the new content

Worth saying out loud: clearing the Acolyte’s chain is also the cleanest way to dip into the new content the DLC adds. The N’tormat Page you collect along the way feeds directly into her kit, and the boss-rush arena at the end of the chain is a reasonable preview of the harder stuff the Soulbound Threshold Trial throws at you in the public Trials mode. So even if you only care about unlocking the character for the menu, you’ll have a sense of what Hallowed Concepts adds to the late game by the time she’s in your roster.

If you’d rather start with the easier of the two new survivors, the Enforcer guide covers his kit, how to enable him, and what the Trials of N’kuhana actually are.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report

Kerwin Stewart Editor-in-Chief

Founder and editor of Pixel Herald. Every story is checked against our Editorial Standards and links its sources.

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