Review: Vikings - The Immersive Experience (London)

This immersive exhibition detailing the legend of Queen Kraka, King Ragnar and their four sons sails into Canada Water's Dock X direct from a successful run in Hamburg

Photo: Vikings: The Immersive Experience

Over a thousand years on from the Viking age, a new immersive exhibition detailing the story of Queen Kraka, King Ragnar Lodbrok and their four sons has arrived at Dock X in Canada Water, fresh off a successful debut in Hamburg. Mixing 360-degree immersive projections, virtual reality, and interactive elements alongside more traditional displays of replicas and a detailed audio guide, Vikings: The Immersive Experience invites visitors to step back in time to learn more about the time period and bills itself as the UK's largest ever immersive Vikings experience.

It's the latest in a string of immersive exhibitions that have graced London in the past twelve months, which have covered everything from Tutankhamum to the Titanic and Pompeii, but unlike those that preceeded it, Vikings: The Immersive Exhibition has placed a far greater focus on creating a cinematic, theatrical experience that's immersive outside of its VR and 360-degree projection sequences.

Photo: Vikings: The Immersive Experience

The experience begins with audiences seated in the Threshold Chamber for a short video that's projected onto a rock face. Opening with a slideshow of artefacts and tapestries from the era, the film sets the stage for what's to come before transitioning into an animation depicting the 793 AD raid of Lindisfarne - an island off the coast of northeast England - shown from the perspective of a small child and her pet wolf.

After being ushered through a door that opens up in the rock face, guests enter the main space and immediatly come upon Yggdrasil, a towering tree that's adorned with hundreds of runes hanging from its branches. While in Norse mythology, it's said to connect the heavens, the middle world and the underworld; within the exhibition, it's the focal point of the VR experience, with dozens of VR headsets sat atop fur-lined swivel chairs surrounding its trunk.

With virtual reality headsets on, guests experience a 6-minute-long VR sequence that firmly introduces them to the mix of reality and mysticism that's prevalent throughout the exhibition. The VR experience manages to cover quite a lot of ground in a short space of time, depicting Sigurd the Dragonslayer coming into possession of the mythical sword Gram, complete with a ferocious wolf that snarls inches from your face and vanquishes a number of chained-up men with ease, as well as the first encounter between Ragnar Lodbrok and his future wife, Kraka, where she's given a tricksy riddle to solve before the pair can meet again, and he commits himself to her.

Photo: Vikings: The Immersive Experience

From here, the scope of the exhibition widens to cover far more than just the Ragnarssons and touches on everything from the Vikings' social structures and craftsmanship to their beliefs and urban settlements. In place of the traditional wall-mounted informational panels you'd expect to see in most other exhibitions, Vikings: The Immersive Experience primarily provided context and key information about the Viking Age through audio headsets, which are given to each guest upon arrival.

While entering certain areas will automatically trigger audio to play, and they feature throughout the opening project and main 360-degree immersive show, the majority of the 14+ recordings available to visitors need to be manually triggered by selecting each chapter on the device.

Alongside the VR section, the exhibition also contains a number of other interactive elements, which skew towards being family-focused, including an AI-enhanced installation of Kraka, which guests can converse with via a microphone (a disclaimer makes clear that her answers may not be historically accurate); a knot station where they can try their hand at tying ropes in the same way Viking seafarers would have; several interactive maps that chart where the Vikings travelled across Europe; and the chance to see if they're worthy of removing Gram, the mythical sword wielded by Sigurd the Dragonslayer, from a tree, which echoes the sword in the stone at Disney parks.

One of Vikings: The Immersive Experience's standout elements is the set design, which helps it distinguish itself from the rest of the city's immersive exhibitions. The vast main space that houses the majoirty of the exhibits has been made up to look like the Forest of Time, a dense woodland area complete with patches of moss and ferns lining the floors throughout, and the atmospheric lighting gives it a wonderful, other-worldly feel that reinforces the mythical elements that appear throughout.

Photo: Vikings: The Immersive Experience

The exhibition's centrepiece is the immersive projection show, which lasts around 30 minutes and plays out in a huge, white-walled room further into the experience. Guests enter the space in groups every half hour through the 'Mist of Time' – a pair of glass rooms that act as a transitional space between the exhibition and the film, with a huge blast of fog machine vapour filling the rooms before a curtain lifts and guests are ushered inside the screening room.

Projections covering all four walls as well as the floor of the space, and the immersive show is visually all-encompassing. In the centre of the room sits a replica Viking longship with a retractable sail, which visitors are free to sit in for the show's duration. Those attending with younger guests can expect them to make a beeline for the longship when given the opportunity, but as you'd expect, space onboard is limited…

Photo: Vikings: The Immersive Experience

Broken up into over a dozen individual scenes, the immersive show charts the story of Kraka and Ragna from their wedding and the birth of their sons through to their eventual deaths. Most of the content on offer in this room is fairly abstract, with only sparse dialogue on offer to provide clues as to what's being depicted. Visually, it's all pretty dazzling, not least the naval scenes in which the space's longship seemingly sails alongside dozens of other boats on choppy waters and depictions of the clan riding into battle on horseback through an endless red mist, but the lack of context as to what each scene is meant to be cover does lessen its overall impact somewhat.

The final two spaces of the exhibition come after the immersive show, and explore the 1904 excavation of a Viking burial site in Oseberg, Norway, and the expansive network of global trade the Vikings built, which is highlighted by a number of items from across the continent and the world found buried alongside them in their graves.

Photo: Vikings: The Immersive Experience

Vikings: The Immersive Experience's fusing of traditional exhibition elements with modern technology makes it the kind of experience that's both appealing to younger visitors and satisfyingly informative for their parents.

Thanks to some wonderful set design, engaging interactive elements and an impressive projection-led experience, it ends up being a step above many of the other similar experiences on offer in London this Spring, and strikes the balance between being both educational and entertaining.

★★★½

[Tickets gifted in exchange for an honest review]

Buy tickets to Vikings: The Immersive Experience

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Vikings: The Immersive Experience runs at Dock X in Canada Water until 31st May 2026. Tickets are priced from £23.00 for Adults and £19.00 for Children. For more information and to book tickets, visit feverup.com