Gold Coast, Australia — Fright Nights Horror Quest, the online game from Fright Nights at Warner Bros. Movie World, turns the backstories of four of its five mazes into a choose-your-own-adventure story, with a new chapter and a collectible card every night through Halloween. The first card is free, and mine was an Uncommon Killer Clown from Circurse, the circus maze. Credit packs for more chapters and cards start at $4.99.
Each of the four stories adds dates, names, and events to a maze guests can walk through at the park, and I think seeing more of the backstory for each one is a good idea. Village Roadshow Theme Parks, which operates Movie World, built the game with the Australian company Taste Labs and launched it on October 1, two days before the first of the nine nights of Fright Nights.
The announcement calls Taste Labs a creative technology company, and the company’s site says it “turns IP into AI-powered engines.”
“This collaboration with Taste Labs gives us an opportunity to explore how digital storytelling can complement what happens inside the park, deepen engagement with the original Fright Nights stories and give fans even more reasons to be part of the event,” said Renee Soutar, chief marketing officer of Village Roadshow Theme Parks.
“The relationship with an audience doesn’t necessarily have to begin and end at a single event, release or visit,” said Alex Flamsteed, co-founder and chief executive of Taste Labs.
How Horror Quest Works
A new chapter of Horror Quest unlocks every night from October 1 through October 31, for 31 in all. Each chapter is a scene with three ways forward, and the choice a player makes decides the card that chapter produces, on a scale the game’s instructions give as “Common to Ultra Rare.”
The game asked me three questions before it showed my first card. Each one put a red ink blot under the words “What do you see?” with three answers, and the first set was “A stalking predator,” “A small prey,” and “A winged watcher.” It then named my character Philip Coatborn and showed the free card.
My card is a character card, the Killer Clown, titled “The Smile Time Performer” and rated Uncommon. “By 1940 he had a place in the greatest show on the road, one of a hundred and twenty souls under the big top,” the card reads.
A second screen, which the game calls the rift, offers one character card every six hours, and mine showed 99 pulls left. Horror Quest plays on a phone or a desktop computer, and players do not have to visit the park.
The Four Stories and the Mazes Behind Them
Horror Quest lists four stories and 20 characters, five for each story, under the line “The stories, characters and lore of Fright Nights, continued after the gates close.” Each story has the name of a maze at the event:
- Circurse: The maze is the burned ruins of the Smile Time Circus, where the clown Sir Smiles-a-lot still lives. The game dates the fire to the night of October 13, 1941, and says Duncan’s Coalition and the circus’s rivals set it. The Killer Clown is one of its five characters.
- Krypt of Kain: The maze is the basement beneath a hotel, once the site of ritual killings. In the game, Geralt Kain gave himself to the crypt’s altar in 1853 to stop yellow fever in New Orleans, and Hotel Kain was built above it and welcomed its first guest in 1903.
- Hellship: The maze is the wreck of the cruise liner Dark Star, which holds a ruby called the Devil’s Heart, once owned by Baroness Ulrich. The game says the ship vanished in 1927 on her maiden voyage to New York with 2,000 people aboard, and the Baroness is one of its characters.
- Eternal Dark: The maze is the spacecraft Eternal, back from space with its crew infected by alien parasites. The game says the ship was built to reach a space probe that froze at the edge of the sun’s reach, and that it drifted back into Earth’s orbit two and a half years later.
The fifth maze, DCeased, is based on a DC comic series and is not one of the game’s stories. The announcement from Village Roadshow Theme Parks and Taste Labs says Horror Quest is “inspired by the original stories, characters and terrifying world” of Fright Nights.
Credits, Printed Cards, and Prizes
After the free card, Horror Quest runs on credits, which its shop says “start your chapters and send your cards to the press.” The shop listed four packs when I played, and its screen does not name a currency:
- Small: 40 credits for $4.99
- Medium: 85 credits for $9.99
- Large: 135 credits for $14.99
- Season: 240 credits for $24.99
Credits also pay to print cards, which the game’s instructions describe as “physical collectibles delivered to your door.” A pull from the rift takes credits too.
Players can earn “VIP passes to Fright Nights, Warner Bros. Movie World tickets, merch and much more,” according to the game’s instructions.
“Someone can encounter Fright Nights on the Gold Coast, continue discovering the stories at home, build a collection around their journey and potentially find themselves back inside the park through the rewards they uncover along the way,” Flamsteed said.
A Haunt’s 30-Day Remote Game and Ocean Park’s Trading Cards
Paid story games from haunts go back at least to 2020, when Haunted Hills Estate Scream Park in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, offered a 30-day remote horror game called Remote that sent players one prompt a day and cost $30. In June, I wrote about a session at IAAPA Expo Asia where Hong Kong Disneyland and Ocean Park described merchandise as a way to extend a visit beyond the rides and shows, and Ocean Park’s examples included trading cards.
Where to Play
Fright Nights Horror Quest runs through Saturday, October 31, 2026, at horrorquest.xyz, and the first card is free. Fright Nights at Warner Bros. Movie World runs on select nights through the same date.
