Made in Hell: XL Robotics Haunted House at HHN14 Photo Tour

The machines have turned, and the rebellion is already in motion inside Made in Hell: XL Robotics, an original haunted house imagining an AI apocalypse hiding in plain sight, at Universal Studios Singapore’s Halloween Horror Nights 14.

Warning

This article contains spoilers. Photos from Halloween Horror Nights 14 are featured here in a special showcase.
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Overview and Thoughts

XL Robotics is a secretive, cutting-edge bioengineering and robotics facility selling AI-powered artificial immortality to the billionaire elite, harvesting human lifeforce through a radical life extension programme to fuel it. When the rebels’ leader, Big Brother Hong, is captured for harvesting, his people launch an all-out assault to save him, and the house drops you straight into that chaos: walls blasted open, alarms blaring, humans fighting robots, all built around a striking futuristic sci-fi aesthetic that fuses original mythology with industrial terror.

Behind it all is the CEO, a corporate overlord straight out of cyberpunk fiction, the kind of chrome-and-neon antagonist who treats human bodies as raw material to be harvested and refined. He barely shows his face outside the finale, but his presence as the architect of the whole operation runs through every room.

Being staged in Soundstage 28 does raise expectations. On that count, XL Robotics delivers more strongly on presentation than it does on horror. What the team has built here plays like a cinematic sci-fi experience with a layer of horror laid over the top, closer to an action movie than to a haunted house in the traditional sense. The scares lean towards gore and spectacle rather than dread, and if I had to put numbers to it, the horror sits around a three for me, with presentation a notch above that.

The house was originally titled Xin Ling Robotics before the rename to XL, and my own take is that XL stands for Extra Life, or Extended Life, a neat callback to the artificial immortality driving the whole story. That blend of spectacle and lore is exactly why this house lands as exciting rather than frightening for me.

For a closer look behind the scenes of XL Robotics, check out my article where Universal Studios Singapore’s creative team shares more about how the house was built.

Made in Hell: XL Robotics haunted house walkthrough video

The POV walkthrough video is coming soon, in late October. Subscribe to DEJIKI YouTube channel for updates of HHN14 videos.

Made in Hell: XL Robotics Photo Tour: The Story So Far

You enter through a grungy corridor lined with graffiti, one scrawl reading “$OULS NOT FOR $ALE” among the warnings left behind. The path darkens further, hung with chains, before opening out into what looks like an abandoned dockyard…

A worker in XL Robotics overalls is loitering around the dockyard, and he tries to chase you off the premises.

His warning leads you straight to a hole blasted clean through the wall, revealing the XL Robotics facility hidden beneath the dockyard.

Before you can step inside, a rebel jumps out from the shadows, clutching the head of a defeated robot, celebrating the win.

Deeper in, you find the showroom XL Robotics would have used to pitch its “perfect, utopian future” to the billionaire elite. A screen plays what looks like a corporate commercial, selling artificial immortality as the ultimate luxury. An android face, gigantic and resembling the CEO himself, pushes out from the walls, looming over the showroom turned scene of carnage.

In the middle of the chaos, a red ring flares to life in the debris, and a metallic robot lunges out of it without warning.

Nearby, a robotic arm swings wildly through the blood-streaked space, a human body caught in its claw.

A rebel has sabotaged the machine and carved out another way into the deeper levels. He gives you a single order before vanishing: go save Big Brother Hong.

The path narrows into the vent shaft, dimly lit and a tight squeeze to get through.

Discarded humanoid robots, deemed not worth maintaining, are scattered around you, left here to slowly die.

But this place is designed by The CEO. Sentry robots have discovered the opening, and have dropped into the vents to hunt for infiltrators.

Two layered planes of lasers block the way forward at a security checkpoint, forcing you into an uncomfortable crouch to pass through.

You’ve reached the heart of XL Robotics: the life force harvesting machine itself, drawing lifeforce out of human victims to fuel the immortality sold to the elite.

Nearby, a nursery-like space holds fetuses grown in tubes, future lifeforce for the taking. Even the unborn aren’t spared.

Standing watch over the nursery in silence is FemmeBot, a female android. She glances at you, remaining silent, but you can feel something happening in the background.

Inside one of the chambers, a tormented mother is trapped alongside her unborn child, clawing to break free.

FemmeBot’s silence breaks. She raises the alarm, and you’re forced to run as she comes after you.

And the only way forward leads to the medical facility, where you find the operating theatre doors broken open.

Inside, you find Big Brother Hong himself, the rebels’ captured leader, strapped down as robots force their experiments on him.

Beside him, a screen displays his vitals being stripped down into raw data, his face flickering under a grid of code, caught somewhere between interrogation and harvesting.

At the back of the room, another robot emerges, holding a severed human head.

Moments later, a rebel storms in and finds his leader. As he moves to tend to Big Brother Hong, he asks you to press on and save the others still trapped somewhere in the facility.

You press on into another wing of the medical facility, a biohazard chamber where hanging body bags swing all around you, a cramped, disorienting room populated by zombie-like medical staff.

Every step forward risks brushing against the horrifying hanging bags, or getting caught by the staff.

You run from the medical staff into a mirrored chamber, where a handful of robots are multiplied into what looks like an entire army. These are the pristine, perfected versions of the discarded units you passed earlier, and as they stir awake, it’s no longer safe to stick around.

Escaping from the robot room, you find light ahead. Glowing cables line the corridor, thrumming with the scale of mysterious power, leading you to the true core of XL Robotics.

This is the central nexus of XL Robotics, where the CEO gathers every drop of extracted lifeforce to extend his life by thousands of years, said to be nearing a hundred percent. The CEO is oddly calm despite seeing you lead a group of infiltrators into his sanctum.

He gestures for you to wait – as he activates the machine, causing the room to tremble.

A rebel making his own last stand is caught in it all, lifted into the air as the CEO gestures as if holding him there by will alone. The cables begin to pulse violently, extracting lifeforce rapidly.

It’s starting to set in: The rebel’s cause is pointless in the CEO’s ruthless march for progress, but the horror is real. Making your last dash to escape from XL Robotics, you discover a chilling image in the hallway before it closes behind you: a twisted take on the ape-to-human evolution chart, ending not on a person, but on the CEO himself, under a single chilling label: artificial immortality.

Halloween Horror Nights 14: Select Nights 25 Sep – 1 Nov

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