While Halloween is drawing nearer, the clock is ticking before Epic Games reveals this year’s Fortnitemares event, which will carry Fortnite through spooky season with haunting new skins, bosses, weapons, and points of interest on the map. Until that drops, though, there is another way to get your Fortnitemares fix if you happen to be visiting Universal Studios in Orlando or Hollywood.
This year’s Halloween Horror Nights (HHN) event has continued the recent trend of gaming properties having a major presence. The past few years have seen The Last of Us, Fallout, and Five Nights at Freddy’s brought to life, thanks in no small part to the popularity of the live-action adaptations of each. This year, Fortnite takes center stage with Fortnitemares scare zones based on the annual celebration of all things horror taking place on both coasts, with each park getting a unique take on the event.
To adapt Fortnitemares, creative teams at both Universal parks worked with Epic Games to craft an experience that feels genuine to the experience of traversing a Fortnite island. Speaking to GameSpot, Universal Studios Orlando creative development show director Ramón Paradoa set the stage. Guests are dropped into the middle of Freaky Fields, a Fortnitemares location from the past two years (Chapter 5, Season 4 and Chapter 6, Season 4) during a battle royale round.
“You’ve got pumpkins. You’ve got scarecrows. You’ve got cornfields. You’ve got barns. You’ve got a bunch of creepy jack-o’-lanterns with glowing faces. A lot of things that you expect and feel like Halloween comfort food,” he explained. “But how do we take it further?”
That’s the process Paradoa refers to as “HHNifying” the property, going beyond adapting the aesthetics and finding a way to make it immersive. In Orlando, that starts as you enter the zone and are faced with a version of a character-select screen, with Skull Trooper Jonesy as the chosen skin. Your mission is to survive Freaky Fields to get to the Halloween Horror Nights POI on the other side, where you’re greeted by the Battle Bus and the makings of a spooky party. (While normally you would start your match on the Battle Bus, having it present at the end of the scare zone makes sense, given the extraction endgame introduced last season.) Along the way, you’ll cross paths with popular Fortnite skins and even some deeper-cut NPCs.
“What we landed on in partnership with Epic Games was bringing the Shadows to life,” Paradoa said. “If you remember the Shadow characters that were kind of derivative of the Shadow Midas character from a few years ago, [we’re] bringing those characters in as monsters that are traversing through this space, in addition to Husks. And I think people who go way back with Fortnite and Epic Games lore, no one loved those Husks.”
Shadows first arrived in the Fortnitemares 2020 event as a monster players would become after being eliminated in a match. Husks, on the other hand, come from Fortnite: Save the World and are still tormenting those playing the game’s original mode. In the scare zone, both of the monsters–as well as the skinned “players”–are costumed characters moving freely throughout the zone, doing whatever they can to torment guests passing through. Well, most of them are, anyway.
