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Image: Kerry Churcher Koro , a brand new production company specialising in immersive and interactive theatre, tours its critically acclaimed playable theatre piece, 1884, this autumn. The tour includes HOME Manchester, Warwick Arts Centre in Coventry, Carrow House in Norwich (as part of Norwich Theatre Beyond), and the Wellcome Collection in London. Created by a team of creatives led by award-nominated playwright Rhianna Ilube, 1884 is an immersive game-theatre show inspired by the legacy of the 1884 Berlin Conference, an often-overlooked historical turning point for the African continent and the world. Welcome to Wilhelm Street. Make yourself at home! Photo: Paul Husband Taking place in a modern fictionalised setting named Wilhelm Street, 1884 isn’t a history lesson – it’s a fun, fast-paced, and thought-provoking journey where play and protest meet. Played around tables, participants form small family groups, collaborate on playful activities, and make choices about how to build their family community and make their house a home. However, as rules are gradually imposed on the groups and it becomes increasingly clear that not everything is within their control, they must decide how to respond. 1884 asks: how is history recorded, and who is left outside of the room where history is written? Somewhere nearby, there’s a meeting going on. A very important meeting. Run by very important people. Making very important decisions about your lives. But you and your family are not allowed inside… Photo: Alex Brenner Co-created by artists, historians and activists, 1884 is a groundbreaking game-theatre show inspired by the impact and legacy of the 1884 Berlin Conference which contributed to the carving up of the African continent by colonial powers. The experience invites audience members to build a community and connect with strangers, ultimately exploring the ways in which anti-colonial resistance movements have been excluded from our public history and collective historical narrative, and how this omission highlights a glaring oversight in how we memorialise the impacts of colonialism. Co-creator, writer and project director Rhianna Ilube commented: 1884 was inspired by the work of activists from the African diaspora in Berlin who have been raising awareness about how Germany has largely erased the memory of its role in the colonisation of Africa. I wanted to bring the story of the 1884 conference to the UK, but the nature and impact of this show has gone much further than I could've imagined. 1884, created over a year of debates, experimentation and playtests with Coney and amazing creative collaborators, touches on the heart of crucial questions about land ownership, memorial cultures, decolonisation, gentrification, protest and more. I'm so proud that it will be experienced - and shaped - by even more audiences across the UK and in Athens this autumn, and I am happy that Koro is taking the show forward. Photo: Alex Brenner Led by artistic director Marie Klimis , Koro is a new production company specialising in grassroots immersive, interactive, and site-specific theatre. Continuing the legacy of former game-makers and co-creators of 1884 Coney , Koro create, produce, and tour shows that place the audience at the heart of the storytelling experience, with work that centres on urgent contemporary narratives that reflect society and history. Koro will launch a new biennial festival of socially-engaged immersive and site-specific theatre in 2027, with a special focus on celebrating the voices of migrant and global majority theatremakers. Photos: Marie Klimis/Rhianna Ilube/Tatenda Shamiso Acclaimed playwright, theatre-maker, and film programmer, Rhianna Ilube has recently been selected to join the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at Juilliard in New York. She was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Playwriting, and Highly Commended for the Soho Theatre's Verity Bargate Award (Samuel Takes a Break… - The Yard Theatre, 2024). Rhianna is currently writer-on-attachment at the Royal Court Theatre, and an alumna of the Royal Court Writers Group and the Oxford Playmakers. Performance director Tatenda Shamiso won the Emerging Talent Award at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards 2023 (NO I.D. - Royal Court, 2023), and was the Associate Director on the West End return of For Black Boys… (Garrick Theatre, 2024). Koro's 1884 is at Wellcome Collection near Euston from 22nd to 25th November 2025. Tickets can be booked via wellcomecollection.org

Image: COLAB Theatre Step inside a new era of theatre at the Invitational Theatre Festival this September at the COLAB Tower. Over one extraordinary weekend, discover boundary-pushing performances that don’t just immerse you—they invite you in. This pioneering new form of theatre places the audience at the heart of the story, not as passive spectators, but as welcomed participants in a shared narrative. From intimate encounters to daring large-scale experiments, the festival showcases bold creators redefining how stories are told. Whether you’re an artist, a theatre-lover, or simply curious about what comes next, the Invitation Theatre Festival is your chance to be part of something truly revolutionary. The Shop for Mortals and All Fools by Vinicius Salles Photo: James Lawson Old relics, curious finds, hidden trinkets, and heirlooms – treasures that whisper forgotten stories. In this enigmatic shop, a select audience is invited to an exclusive preview of its mysterious collection. Step into a world where gods and mortals clash, and chaos reigns supreme. Where the memories you thought were long forgotten still linger, haunting your every step. The Shop for Mortals and All Fools is a site-responsive and immersive physical theatre experience conceived by Vinicius Salles. Inspired by Euripides’ The Bacchae, this bold production delves into one of the greatest tragedies ever written, weaving an original and compelling narrative that explores power, vengeance, and the fragility of the human spirit. Photos: James Lawson 💰 From £22.00 🕒 13th September - 3rd October 2025 🎟️ Book via tickettailor.com CREATURE by Peter Broughton Image: Peter Broughton Creature - the most exclusive immersive experience in London this year. One audience member. One experience. From Peter Broughton (Co-Creator and Associate Director of Bacchanalia) comes a fusion of puppetry and immersive theatre, inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Take a seat in a wheelchair, guided into darkness by a gas-masked figure, and don headphones that plunge you into a world of shadows, sound, and tension. Confront the phenomenal, towering puppet in an intimate, one-on-one encounter with the unknown. "I told you I would be with you on your wedding night. And here I am, as promised." 💰 From £102.00 🕒 26th - 27th September 2025 🎟️ Book via tickets.colabtheatre.co.uk Uncle Barry's Birthday Party by UNCLE BARRY Photo: UNCLE BARRY What makes for a fun party? People (you’re invited), gossip (someone has to spill the beans), booze (obviously), dancing (optional), flirting (encouraged), cake (yes), a good playlist (please)... and Uncle Barry! You're invited to share an evening with us, celebrating Uncle Barry's Birthday. We know he'd love to have you. Photos: UNCLE BARRY/James Lawson 💰 From £19.20 🕒 26th - 27th October 2025 🎟️ Book via tickets.colabtheatre.co.uk The End by COLAB Theatre Image: COLAB Theatre The world outside is lost — the husks roam, the infected devour, and every choice means life or death. Humanity’s last survivors have gathered in the bunker, but safety comes at a price. Trust is fragile. Secrets run deep. And sabotage is never far away. Apocalypse isn’t just a game. It’s a live-action survival horror experience where you and your fellow survivors are thrown into the final days of civilisation. You’ll forge uneasy alliances, solve desperate challenges, and fight to prove your worth — because when the bunker doors close, not everyone gets to stay inside. Step into a world of fear, strategy, and betrayal. Feel the tension rise. Hear the husks scratching at the walls. When survival is on the line, how far will you go? 💰 From £12.00 🕒 26th - 27th September 2025 🎟️ Book via tickets.colabtheatre.co.uk Medea by Robert Halvorson and Adelaide Leonard Image: Robert Halvorson and Adelaide Leonard Euripides’ play Medea serves as the point of departure for this one-woman show that can be performed with multiple actors. Maddy’s expectations of Santa Fe, New Mexico, are falling short. She’s isolated, her YouTube channel is stalling out, and her husband, Jay, is leaving her for another woman. All without a second thought for their daughter, Bella, who Maddy feels further away from than ever right at the moment Bella begins puberty. In rage, Maddy acts out and puts her family in danger. With those she cares about most remaking their lives without her, Maddy starts plotting her revenge - sleeping with a long-time protege, lashing out at lawyers, and opening up old wounds. Teetering on the edge, Maddy clings to her spiritual practice. When it becomes clear Jay will not take her back, she chooses to do anything, including taking a life, to prove she’s worth it. 💰 From £9.60 🕒 16th - 27th September 2025 🎟️ Book via tickets.colabtheatre.co.uk Spy of the Year by Tom Black/Arlo Howard/Chloe Mashiter/Hannah Raymond-Cox Photo: Spy of the Year The Spy of the Year Awards is the most important night in any spy’s calendar, but this year’s celebrations are threatened when a shady organisation begins leaking top secret information. Even worse: one of the agents at your table is the leak. Together, can you get past personal vendettas, messy histories and emotional revelations to uncover the leak before the end of the night? Fresh from sold-out runs in LA, Chicago, and London’s own Voidspace Festival, Spy of the Year is an original Jubensha led by a live actor, blending role-play with puzzle solving and hidden traitor games. A strictly limited capacity of six players will face challenges, swap secrets and solve mysteries as the clock ticks down. Whether you’re a James Bond, an Ethan Hunt or a George Smiley, get ready to uncover the truth… 💰 From £12.00 🕒 26th - 27th September 2025 🎟️ Book via tickets.colabtheatre.co.uk Timonopoly by Brite Theatre Image: Brite Theater Come Fortune! Let’s play a game. It’s only money... Inspired by Timon of Athens, one of Shakespeare’s least known works, Timonopoly is a unique experience, a game, a show, an event. Play a game with Fortune and see how easily any of us can fall through the cracks of society... whoops! Brite Theater continue to push the immersive envelope, creating ever more daring audience-specific work and bold adaptations of classical material. The long-anticipated final instalment of the multi-award-winning Coward Conscience trilogy, following Richard III (a one-person show) and Hamlet (an experience), Timonopoly is fresh from a successful first run at Edinburgh Fringe. 💰 From £18.00 🕒 26th September 2025 🎟️ Book via tickets.colabtheatre.co.uk DREAM CAGE by King Lexie Image: Dream Cage For twenty minutes, in a dreamworld built for two, a performance unfolds. Not of spectacle, but of attention and curiosity. DREAM CAGE is a tender framework for an intimate encounter, treating the landscape of a dream as the most precious of materials. It is a one-to-one ritual that asks: What happens when the sound a dream makes is given a voice? An interaction with dreaming and the spaces in-between awaits. 💰 From £18.00 🕒 26th - 27th September 2025 🎟️ Book via tickets.colabtheatre.co.uk Strangers: A Magic Play by Joe Strickland Image: Joe Strickland To celebrate its ten-year anniversary, Strangers is returning with a brand new interactive storytelling magic show. In the same way that a musical blends theatre with music and lyrics, Strangers: A Magic Play blends theatre with magic and illusion. Stories are interwoven with magic and audience collaboration to create an audience experience which challenges what and how we think about magic and performance. 💰 From £18.00 🕒 27th September 2025 🎟️ Book via tickets.colabtheatre.co.uk The Evil Ex Game by Jet Vellinga Image: Jet Vellinga Madame X invites you to her tea parlour for an intimate evening of storytelling, gossip, and connection. She’s offered to facilitate a special version of “The Evil Ex Game”—an obscure party game she came across this past July.* According to its rulebook, players must “share the best stories about their worst dates.” How provocative! At its heart, the game is simple: Draw a card, overshare, vote for the best story, rinse and repeat. However, as with everything that piques Madame’s interest, there’s more to this game than meets the eye. Perhaps your neighbor steals your card, or worse, your story! And speaking of stories... Bear in mind that Madame only serves tea to patrons with particularly scandalous (hi)stories. Will you spill the tea? RSVP now. *Despite its title, The Evil Ex Game is about romance and dating in general and (Evil) Exes are not required to play. 💰 From £6.00 🕒 26th - 27th September 2025 🎟️ Book via tickets.colabtheatre.co.uk Cool Lab Office of Terrestrial Confusion - Tunnel 1 A debriefing on Earth’s most unstable export. Welcome back to HQ. Your exposure to the human construct known as “COOL” has been confirmed. You arrive here as both expert witness and data point. Preliminary findings remain inconclusive. Contradictions persist. Some insist “COOL” is a resource, others a performance, a weapon, or simply an elaborate Earth joke. Your testimony will decide which version survives. Your mission is to distil its components and trace its patterns: where it appears, who names it, who carries it, how it mutates across borders, fashions, and generations. Working in pods under live supervision, you will classify specimens, perform field tests, and debate paradoxes. Will you argue? Will you contradict each other? Will you contradict yourselves? This is a participatory research facility. All findings will be archived by the Office of Terrestrial Confusion to prepare the next upcoming missions to Earth. Observation commences now. 💰 From £24.00 🕒 26th - 27th September 2025 🎟️ Book via tickets.colabtheatre.co.uk Andy's Coming by Chronic Insanity Image: Chronic Insanity Toy Story meets Kill Bill, the audience becomes the revenge seeking childhood toys of a university student after they've been abandoned at a charity shop. With the guidance of their magic 8 ball, the toys plot their comeback in this fully interactive TTRPG theatre show. Journey through the high street to find allies and supplies, before confronting your one time owner in a thrilling climax. 💰 From £18.00 🕒 13th September 2025 🎟️ Book via tickets.colabtheatre.co.uk TATE Accompli by Chronic Insanity Image: Chronic Insanity You've gotten the gang back together for one last heist, and the prize is a big one; the centre piece of the brand new exhibition at the Tate Modern. However, when you break into the gallery that evening, the clock strikes midnight and something changes in the air. It's like you've crossed over into some other reality where up is now down, the sleeping have awoken, and nothing will be the same again. Tate Accompli is the new TTRPG live show, from award-winning theatre company Chronic Insanity, about what happens if you try and steal art from the public for your own private gain. 💰 From £18.00 🕒 27th September 2025 🎟️ Book via tickets.colabtheatre.co.uk Imprisoned with the Pharos by Chronic Insanity Image: Chronic Insanity Chronic Insanity invites you into an immersive horror experience inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s Imprisoned with the Pharaohs. As magicians and archaeologists exploring a pyramid, your choices will determine the story’s twists and turns. Will you confront the ancient foe or escape to safety? Every performance is uniquely crafted by you; How you respond to the adventure, how it responds to you, and whether the tower of bricks at the centre of it all, ready to be excavated, will instead topple and seal your fate. This is a TTRPG theatre show from award-winning theatre company Chronic Insanity. 💰 From £18.00 🕒 20th September 2025 🎟️ Book via tickets.colabtheatre.co.uk The Clocktower Image: The Clocktower Step into the heart of a storm-battered oil rig, where steel walls groan, machinery hums, and suspicion lurks in every shadow. Clocktower is a social deduction game in a gritty, nautical setting. Over the course of the game, you and your fellow players will take on key roles aboard the rig — each with unique abilities that could save the crew… or sabotage it. Together, you must uncover who among you is working against the group before it’s too late. If you enjoy Werewolf, Mafia, Traitors or Blood on the Clocktower...you're gonna love this! The setting creates a tense, industrial atmosphere: a common space where alliances form, secrets unravel, and trust is tested. As the game unfolds, expect bluffing, bold accusations, and clever strategy — with no one ever fully out of the action. Whether you’re a seasoned social deduction player or brand new to the format, Clocktower promises a thrilling experience of mystery, betrayal, and high-stakes decision-making deep at sea. 💰 From £20.50 🕒 22nd October - 1st November 2025 🎟️ Book via tickets.colabtheatre.co.uk COLAB Invitational Festival runs at COLAB Tower near London Bridge from 26th to 27th September 2025, with select shows running across various other dates in September and October. For more information and to book tickets, visit tickets.colabtheatre.co.uk

Photo: Harry Johnson From Saturday 18th October to Sunday 2nd November, families are invited to enjoy a limited-time Halloween Trick-or-Treat adventure at The Paddington Bear Experience, London’s award-winning immersive attraction, located at the iconic County Hall on the South Bank.   From 3pm daily, guests can upgrade their visit with a special Trick-or-Treat package (£10 per child), which includes a souvenir pumpkin sweet bucket, a selection of sweet treats throughout the experience, and a pair of exclusive Paddington Bear ears.   Children will meet beloved characters from the Paddington stories who will be handing out treats along the way, ending in a safe and joyful Halloween celebration in Windsor Gardens. As visitors step into Paddington’s world and embark on an exciting immersive adventure through some of the most memorable locations from the Paddington stories, they begin with the hustle and bustle of Paddington Station, greeted by a friendly Station Master and taken on a lively train journey through London’s most famous landmarks all the way to the Browns’ charming house at No. 32 Windsor Gardens. Once inside the famous tree-adorned hallway, the Brown family whisk guests into a whirlwind of multi-sensory activities as they need to help Paddington and his family prepare for a very special occasion - The Marmalade Day Festival!   With numerous themed rooms to explore, interactive games, character interactions, and lots of surprises along the way, the adventure culminates in a very special Windsor Garden Street party where visitors have the chance to enjoy the Marmalade Day festival. A range of food (including Paddington’s famous marmalade sandwich) and beverages are available to all, as well as an opportunity to enjoy fun and games with the Brown family. The Paddington Bear Experience will capture the hearts of the entire family, no matter the age. The Paddington Bear Experience is a unique and fun-filled interactive experience inspired by the nation’s favourite bear, spanning more than 26,000 square feet of London’s iconic County Hall on the riverside of the Southbank. Photo: Harry Johnson The Paddington Bear Experience is currently running at County Hall on South Bank. To find out more and book tickets, visit paddingtonbearexperience.com

Photo: Universal Studios/Amblin Entertainment Inc The dinosaurs are still roaring at Battersea Power Station, after Jurassic World: The Experience   has become one of London’s most popular family attractions of the year. Since opening in spring 2025, the  must-see family-friendly experience has  already welcomed over 180,000 visitors through its iconic Jurassic World gates.    With demand showing no sign of slowing, NEON has confirmed they are extending the experience’s run and releasing a new wave of tickets, including sought-after peak dates for October half-term and the Christmas holidays. Families and fans of the franchise now have until 4 th  January 2026 to catch the experience before it leaves London.   Excitingly,  guests can also take advantage of special September midweek afternoon prices, with adult explorers able to visit for £23 and children for £18, valid for all sessions from 2pm onwards.  As we enter Autumn, students can also now enjoy 35% off tickets on weekdays by showing a valid student ID at the box office. Photo: Universal Studios/Amblin Entertainment Inc Created by NEON, a global leader in producing experiential entertainment,  Jurassic World: The Experience  is the  inaugural  experience  at the brand-new NEON at Battersea Power Station visitor space,  located next to the iconic London landmark. Bringing one of the biggest blockbuster franchises in cinema history to life for dinosaur fanatics of all ages, the experience is the first of many live entertainment spectaculars set to be staged at this new attraction.   Visitors to the experience are transported into Jurassic World as they walk amongst prehistoric giants and encounter different species across two floors of immersive environments. Highlights include  walking beneath a towering Brachiosaurus, exploring the lab of genetic development, coming face to face with Velociraptor Blue, and even get a rare up-close look at the most vicious dinosaur of them all, the Tyrannosaurus Rex .  Guests can also interact with baby dinosaurs, discover and engage with actual fossilised dinosaur bones. In the coming months, NEON Battersea Power Station is set to host a rolling programme of world-class experiences, with the next major show due to be announced in October. Photo: Universal Studios/Amblin Entertainment Inc Jurassic World The Experience runs at NEON at Battersea Power Station until 4th January 2026. Tickets are priced from £28.95 per person. For more info and to book tickets, visit feverup.com

Photo: Race Across The World: The Experience CityDays has announced plans to launch the first-ever playable experience based on the hit BBC series, Race Across the World with Race Across the World: The Experience, which is set to launch in London this Spring. Pre-sale tickets for the experience will be available at 10am on Wednesday 2nd April, with a general sale following on Friday 4th April 2025. Tickets are priced from £25 per person.   This high-stakes experience will offer players the chance to live out their  Race Across the World  dreams by navigating the streets of London, working as a team, outwitting their competitors, and unlocking hidden secrets of the city in a race to the finish line.   The experience will require strategy, teamwork, and quick thinking, as players are given a budget to manage as they race through the city. This budget can be spent on valuable clues to help navigate the next leg of the journey, giving players the freedom to decide how daring they want to be. Players can also complete “work” tasks to earn extra funds. A high-stakes race against the clock, where every decision counts, and influences the race. Players will be scored based on their time and how much budget they have left, with their final score ranked on a live leaderboard throughout the day and week. The team that completes the challenge in the fastest time with the most budget remaining will earn a shot at being crowned the daily or weekly champions. The race takes participants on a 4-5 km mission through the capital, typically spanning 2-3 hours. Like Race Across The World , this experience highlights the treasures people miss when speeding beneath London on the tube. Passing through key partner venues, including renowned pubs, cultural hotspots, or famous landmarks, each serving as a 'checkpoint' where teams must solve escape room-style puzzles. These puzzles will guide them toward the next leg of the race, offering clues that unveil new parts of the city, all while providing a true taste of London’s hidden gems. Those who sign up for the waitlist can access discounted presale tickets from Wednesday 2 April, with 20% off and 48 hours of exclusive booking before the general release on Friday 4 April. Tickets are priced from £25 per person. Photo: Race Across The World: The Experience  Tom Rymer, Founder of CityDays, said: We are beyond excited to bring the Race Across The World experience to life in London. It’s a dream come true for fans of the show, offering them the chance to dive into the heart-pounding action and strategy that has made the show a hit. What makes this experience truly special is the unique combination of exploring London’s hidden spots while working together in a race against time. We can’t wait to see who comes out on top!   All3Media said : It’s thrilling to be able to bring this iconic TV show from Studio Lambert to life in one of the most vibrant and culturally rich cities in the world. We’re beyond excited to partner with CityDays, true pioneers in urban adventures, making them the perfect team to turn this unforgettable experience into a reality. Together, we’re giving fans the chance to immerse themselves in the heart-pounding action of Race Across The World, and it’s going to be nothing short of spectacular! Race Across The World: The Experience will launch in London on 13th May 2025. For more information, and to book tickets, visit feverup.com

Image: DARKFIELD Renowned for their trademark shipping containers popping up across the UK and internationally, DARKFIELD bring four of their most critically acclaimed productions to London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park from Tuesday 7th October to Sunday 2nd November, in their biggest and longest ever presentation in London. Audiences can find themselves boarding a new airline, slipping into an immersive dream, lost in a labyrinthine hotel, or navigating a war-torn world, across FLIGHT , COMA , EULOGY , and ARCADE . Fresh from sell-out runs at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, BFI London Film Festival, Shoreditch Town Hall, and a region-wide collaboration across Greater Manchester; DARKFIELD present their largest ever collection in the heart of East London, with containers returning to the city for the first time since 2022. Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic Using the nostalgic 8-bit aesthetic of 1980s video games, ARCADE’ s  interactive narrative explores the evolving relationship between players and avatars. Over 30 minutes, players will guide their avatar through a world ravaged by endless war: you can choose a side, win or lose the war, search for a peaceful route, or join a cult promising a better version of reality. Players will ask themselves difficult questions as they navigate a world where some will win and others will lose. No two journeys through the experience will be the same. Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic COMA  invites audiences to take part in a mass experiment, and together, slip into a collective dream, encouraged by a mysterious voice in their headphones. Harnessing all of the skills in DARKFIELD’s  technical arsenal, COMA  takes place in the pitch-darkness, utilising 360-degree binaural sound, and with some unique additions developed specifically for this show that leave audiences wondering what’s real and what’s a dream.  Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic EULOGY  is a surreal, otherworldly journey through a dreamlike, labyrinthine hotel that exists entirely in your mind. How you arrived is a mystery, and why you’re there remains unclear. Just make sure you read the pamphlet. This intense and exhilarating ride uses speech recognition technology to deceive the senses and transport audience members through rooms, down corridors and into the bowels of this strange and not altogether comfortable hotel. How your dream unfolds is, in part, up to you.  Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic FLIGHT  takes place in a shipping container, the interior of which exactly resembles an Airbus 320 economy cabin, and over 30 minutes explores the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, taking audience members through two worlds, two realities and two possible outcomes to their journey. There are many worlds in which this plane lands safely. Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic Bordering their two home bases in Hackney Wick and Silvertown - where the DARKFIELD offices and studio reside - the company are embedding themselves in their local community, building on a rich and growing creative presence in the area. DARKFIELD will work with local creatives and businesses throughout their residency. In addition to the four container experiences, Darkfield will provide a bar area and buzz for audiences to enjoy in between experiences. Will you take on all four containers? Glen Neath, Co-Artistic Director of DARKFIELD, commented: It’s long been our dream to establish a site where we can host all our containers in one place, so we’re very excited to finally open DARKFIELD LONDON so close to our two bases in North-East London. It’s great to have such a long residency at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, which is fast becoming a mainstay in London’s cultural scene. This is the first time we’ve presented our containers in London since 2022, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to be back! Immersing audiences into total darkness, using DARKFIELD’s trademark 360-degree binaural sound delivered through headphones, each container will immerse audiences in a new world where everything is not quite as it seems.  DARKFIELD will be at Queen Elizabeth's Olympic Park from 7th October to 2nd November 2025 with ARCADE, COMA, EULOGY and FLIGHT. Tickets for each show are priced from £14.00. For more information, and to book tickets, visit darkfield.org/london2025

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures/New Line Cinema Warner Bros. Discovery and New Line Cinema will next month open a terrifying immersive museum experience based on Lorraine and Ed Warren’s infamous artefact room, home of the demonic Annabelle doll and hundreds of other possessed artefacts.   Haunting East London from the start of September, The Conjuring Occult Museum will transport fans into the terrifying world of the renowned paranormal investigators like never before, ahead of the final chapter of New Line Cinema’s hugely successful Conjuring Universe films, The Conjuring: Last Rites, released in cinemas on September 5th from Warner Bros. Pictures. Photo: Justin Lubin Taking over the 10,000 sq ft White Rabbit Studios just off Shoreditch High Street, the horror experience will combine over fifty actual props featured in The Conjuring: Last Rites and other films in The Conjuring Universe, including Annabelle and The Nun. The Conjuring: Last Rites stars Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, who play Ed and Lorraine Warren throughout the franchise, have also recorded special content for the experience. Those brave enough to complete the experience will earn a free drink and a short video of their experience. Tickets for the experience are free of charge and will be available from 20th August, whilst walk-ins may also be available on the day. Tickets will be available on a first-come, first-served basis, with limited availability. UPDATE: All tickets have sold out for this event. A second batch of tickets will be released at 2pm on 1st September, with three time slots available. The Conjuring Occult Museum will run from 1st to 3rd September 2025 in Shoreditch. Tickets are free and can be booked via eventbrite.com

Photo: Alex Brenner Immersive Rumours: Hi Owen and Tom. Thanks for speaking to us today! Do you mind introducing yourselves and telling us what your roles are at Bridge Command?  Owen Kingston:  I'm Owen Kingston, I'm the Artistic Director of Parabolic Theatre and Bridge Command. Tom Black:  I'm Tom Black. I'm the Executive Director of Bridge Command, working closely with Owen and the whole team to operate this wonderful ongoing sequential story that we're able to tell. IR: For those who have never been, what’s the Bridge Command experience like? Owen:  It's like being in your own sci-fi series. That's what we're going for. To come to Bridge Command and be a punter is to step into your own sci-fi world, and you be the hero of your own sci-fi story. IR: The first time you both spoke to Immersive Rumours was ahead of the show opening back in March 2024. A lot of the site was still under construction, but we were able to get a hands-on demo of the experience ahead of the public opening. Looking back at that time, what are your overwhelming memories of building and opening the show? Owen:  I think launching a new show is always, to some extent, quite a chaotic process, because it doesn't matter how well you plan it; no plan survives contact with the enemy. Unexpected things happen. When you've got something with as many moving parts and as complex as Bridge Command, it's nearly impossible for it to all go completely smoothly. This is by far and away the biggest thing we’ve ever done. Parabolic has always done quite small shows, and in the past, we've always been able to launch a new show softly and quietly to iron out the kinks without anybody really looking at it. We used to do a lot of stuff with the Croydonites Festival, and it was great because we had two or three weeks to perform to people who were either our hardcore fans, who were willing to come to Croydon to see us, or just the good people of Croydon who didn't really know who we were. You could try something new out of the public gaze and have a chance to fix it before that lens of publicity hit you. That's something that we didn't have with Bridge Command because it's that much more high-profile. The other thing that was memorable from that time is that we were not prepared for how different it would be to run this show for fourteen people than it is to run it for nine people. When we did the first version of Bridge Command back in 2019 on a shoestring budget in the basement of COLAB Factory, it was for six people. We ran that for months and months and months, and it worked really well. When we started planning this new version in January 2020, we thought we could expand it to nine people quite comfortably, and it would work similarly well. About six months before we were due to launch, we had a bit of a crisis with our investors when we were looking at the budgets and thinking, ‘Oh, crumbs, is this actually going to make enough money?’. The decision was taken, rather than to scrap the whole thing entirely, to up the audience capacity again. We did it to survive, really. If we didn’t find more capacity from somewhere, we weren’t going to be able to even open. We put work into that, but I think we didn’t have enough time left to put enough work into that. I think it's fair to say that when we opened, really full shows did not work as well as the shows that had eight to ten people. When we had an absolute maximum capacity audience of fourteen, there were problems because there were people who didn't have enough to do. I think we’ve fixed that problem now, but it took us longer than I would have liked to fix it. Making fixes just took longer than it has on any other show we've ever made in the past. I think it's the difference between - to use a naval analogy - trying to turn around a small boat as opposed to trying to turn around a supertanker. We really felt that with Bridge Command. It's so much more of a bigger proposition, so many more staff, so many more shows that we are running in a day, that to make a meaningful change just took way longer - four or five times longer. Tom:  With Bridge Command, we could meet the next morning and go through it, but then that night, whatever we did, we would be running not one version of the show, but four or five. We'd get loads more data, and of course, not every single one of them would have responded to the change we've just made in the same way. I’d underestimated the scale of being reactive; it became much harder, and it became more of a supertanker. We also had a lot of focus on the onboarding process and the training process. There’s two distinctions there - welcoming people in, literally both off the street and then through the various stages to get into the show and into the world of the show and making clear what's going on, but also the process of training people how to use the ship, the software on the screens, the mechanical things on the ship, all those things. You need to be shown how to use those. It's fair to say that it took us longer than I would have liked, but because of the problems we've mentioned, we didn’t 100% get it right when we opened. I'm really thrilled with how training now works for the show, and we've seen a huge change in feedback. It's been months and months and months, and pretty much no one has raised any issues with it, but it just took time to handle that. Owen:  Those first few months, I remember we used to try and teach people how to use the ships before we'd even put them on the ships. We used to have terminals in the bar and try to get people to play tutorials, but none of that stuck. It took us at least six to eight weeks to settle on what worked in terms of getting people to learn how to fly the ships quickly so that they could then do a meaningful mission afterwards. Photo: Alex Brenner IR: When you first conceived Bridge Command back in 2019, was it ever designed to be an experience that would appeal to absolutely everyone? You're trying to do one thing incredibly well, and that thing is obviously somewhat niche. Some people just don’t like sci-fi, right? Owen: Exactly. I think immersive works best when the product that you've made appeals very strongly to a particular audience. If I'm looking at the advertising, either it makes me go, ‘Yes, I want to do that immediately’, or it makes me go, ‘No, I'll never do that in a million years’. I think one of the problems that immersive theatre has had historically is that it's been all about massive spectacle. It's been about appealing to a very large audience. The economics of the industry have all been built around that. You can look at Punchdrunk or Secret Cinema, who’ve done great shows in the past, and that's been their business model. They want something that's going to attract loads and loads of people every night and justifies a colossal spend and an enormous set. That's one way of doing it, but I think the economics in the last few years have shown that that's not actually the sustainable, brilliant model that maybe it's been made out to be, or maybe even has been in the past. What we're looking at is something different. Parabolic's early work was all about taking much smaller-scale audiences, spending less on it, but making something that is really going to appeal to enough people to be able to see that. The beautiful thing about For King and Country was that you’d look at the advert for that, which said, ‘Can you win the war?’, and if you are in any way a World War II nerd, you're going to want to come and do that. If you're not, you're not. I think Bridge Command does the same thing. If you want to fly a starship, if you want to be like Captain Picard, Captain Kirk or Captain Janeway, then yes, that is going to be for you. If that doesn't float your boat, then maybe not so much. Building shows that are sustainable for a niche but large enough audience to sustain it - I think there’s an interesting business model there which can work. IR: Have audiences' reactions to the experience matched up with what you hoped it would be prior to opening? Owen: Broadly speaking, I’d say yes. Wouldn’t you say so, Tom? Tom: Yeah. I think so. I think in hindsight, we expected people to get really invested in their own naval careers, for want of a better term, and getting promotions. People earn medals and collect different patches. We've got a fan Discord now. It's run by us, but it is full of regular attendees, and we can see how much people are really interested in the ongoing stories of the main cast, so to speak.  Everyone who works here, from front of house through to the people running your ship, they're all actors. Everyone has got a character with a named role and a backstory and everything like that. We sell bar tickets, and there are people who come a couple of times a week; they'll maybe do one mission, but they'll come two or three times to hang out in the bar and play a game, read a book, do some knitting, but also chat to people. They might say ‘I've got a theory as to what's going on in such and such part of space’. Then the character who's in the bar with them will maybe chat to them about that. People really care. I would actually say that is a bit of a surprise. They care even more than I thought they would about hanging out with the characters on an ongoing basis. People always like the characters in Parabolic shows; it was always about the story and about the audience themselves becoming the main characters in a story, but the fact that there is this recurring cast, of us being the people who are on the ship with you when you're doing your adventures, and you can see them over a much longer scale than just the two and a half hours of Crisis, What Crisis?, or For King and Country, I think that's something we didn't… Owen:  We didn’t plan for that did we? Tom: Maybe unconsciously. We created these characters with it in mind, I suppose, without realising, but it's gone down way better than we thought it would be. Owen:  It’s become a soap opera in space for the people that become really invested in it. That's been fuelled by some of the special events and other things that we've done. We've been able to expand that a bit for those who are keen on it. Photo: Alex Brenner IR: Previously, you’ve done one-off events like War Games, and you’ve had two Treaty events so far, right? Owen:  Yup. We've had a couple of others since then as well. You know when there's the novelty episodes of Star Trek where the holodeck breaks or things like that? We did one that felt a bit like that, where all of the crew played by actors succumbed to a weird disease, and they had to be fixed by the audience. We've played with several different things now. We’re about to do one about ██████████ .  Although I don't think we're allowed to talk about that yet, so that's a big spoiler… Tom: Please don’t print that. Our staff has been very good at not dropping any hints about it, so we’re pretty sure the audience are going to have no idea what’s going to happen in that. It’ll be a nice surprise.  For a while now, the special events have been selling out before we really release any details at all. We've ended up in the situation where we haven't needed to reveal the really juicy element of it to sell it, because people are keen and they trust us, I suppose. IR: Are all of these one-off events non-canon or do they feed back into the ongoing narrative? Owen:  Oh, they're very much part of the story. What's happened with those, and it's happened organically rather than us specifically planning it this way, but each of those events has become a milestone moment in the ongoing story of the Adamas Belt and has actually shifted that story along a little bit.  When we ran the treaty, that then affected the missions that we were running. All of the different factions that people were encountering suddenly all of them had signed some form of treaty with each other, and that affected the interactions people had, and it became part of the ongoing narrative. Similarly, in some of the other events we've run, we've had a political election cycle running alongside as part of the story content, so that's fed into some of the things that have happened. It's all part of creating that sense of a world that isn't just static, you know? It continues to build and change and thrive. We're currently shooting a whole load of new content to update the news channel that we run in the bar. When we opened, we had about an hour's worth of TV news that was all relevant to the world. Some of that is very out of date now, so we're in the process of updating it. The plan for the events going forward is to try and do them every couple of months and have that be a way of moving the story along. When you watch Star Trek of old, you'd get lots of monster-of-the-week episodes, lots of things that are very inconsequential are all contained within one episode, and then every now and again, you'd have a big milestone story moment, like Captain Picard becoming a Borg or something like that. That's what we've tried to do with those special events. IR: You’ve also introduced bespoke campaigns recently. Can you tell us a bit about that? Owen:  Honestly, they’re peak Bridge Command. It's the best version of the show you can possibly create, I think. The first one that we did was with people who had met through playing Bridge Command. None of them were friends beforehand, but they had met just doing random pickup shows, and then they decided they got on well. They approached us and said, ‘Would you be willing to do this?’. We thought, ‘Absolutely, that sounds amazing’. So we crafted a story for them, which was over five shows. That story was a linked narrative, and their actions very much determined the outcome as well. We were able to be responsive to that specific group of people. It worked as a format, and it was terrific fun. It's like running a D&D campaign and has very much got that vibe to it.  We assign a member of staff to be the campaign manager, and that member of staff coordinates what's going to happen for the campaign, makes sure they get the staff they need for it, and makes the necessary tweaks to the story. It's terrific fun. What’s nice about it is that it works for people who have never played Bridge Command before but love the concept in principle. If they're willing to trust us upfront with the big wodge of cash, then we can very much give them the time of their lives. It’s one of those things that in your wildest dreams, you hope one day you might be able to make happen. It was one of the bucket list things to do with Bridge Command, and it's incredible to have had a chance to do it and to see it really work as well. Tom: It was huge fun to make, and one of the players in the first outing described it as a ‘love letter to Season 1’, because the campaign itself pulled on various threads that regular participants were used to from all the missions in Season 1. Characters, factions, even a couple of ‘whatever happened to x’ kinds of things.  Without giving anything more away I will say that this went down very well with that group, and we’ve now got half a dozen other groups playing through the same story - though it’s important to say that part of the luxury of a campaign is that the story and how it unfolds is tweaked to reflect your crew’s unique actions, even more so than a normal Bridge Command mission.  And the original group have now booked again, so we need to do it all again! We’ll be continuing their adventure, but it’s a whole new story. So there’ll be a ‘second campaign’ set of 5 missions available to anyone in a few months’ time. Photo: Alex Brenner IR: There’s something really interesting about how more and more immersive shows are operating with ongoing, multi-year narratives nowadays. The Key of Dreams is moving into a new story chapter later this year, Phantom Peak is constantly evolving, and of course, you’ve recently debuted the new chapter of Bridge Command. I think that structure goes a long way to explaining how those kinds of shows have managed to build a loyal fanbase, who return often. Owen: It's just really important to balance it against that first-time experience. If you focus too heavily on fan service and pleasing the returners, you get the same problem that TV series have, which is, if I see a TV series that's run for ten seasons, I'm going to think twice about starting at the first season. It’s a huge investment of time. What we’re always trying to be careful to do with Bridge Command is not put off people who are coming for the first time. We're always trying to be aware of how we frame the experience to people who are encountering Bridge Command for the first time, and making sure that we don't put too high a barrier to entry. Tom: Yes, the overwhelming majority of people experiencing Bridge Command are still brand new to it, though to get statistical for a second, we have seen the number of returning regulars go up, not down, while our overall number of sales increases – so that’s felt really good for our momentum, as it means we aren’t just maintaining the same number of people wanting to come back again and again. We’re winning over more and more new people all the time. Our regulars are very, very welcoming to newcomers, too. There are many happy stories of people coming on their own or in a small group and being nervous, and then being ‘adopted’ by experienced hands on their crew, who afterwards encourage them to join our Discord server and become part of the community. IR: We're a couple of months into Season 2 of Bridge Command now. When you started to structure and work out the plans for these new missions, what were the big takeaways from the first year or so of running missions? [Owen laughs] Owen:  I'm laughing because there was a massive one. When you look at any TV show, particularly sci-fi TV shows, you see the same plots recur over and over again, redressed. You see it a lot in sequels to movies, too, where essentially people are coming to see it because they loved the first movie, so you want to give them enough of the first movie that they liked, but you also need it to feel different so they don't feel like they're just watching the same thing again. Star Trek's a perfect example of something that does that all the time, and Stargate SG-1, which I love, does that really noticeably. I was having a bit of a thought experiment in the lead-up to beginning to write for this new season, and I was thinking, ‘What are the basic plots of Bridge Command?’ The process of analysing that brought me to the conclusion that every single episode we had up to that point was basically the same plot redressed - ‘Save the Guy’. We would send the crew out to go and do something, and they would save a character and bring them back. Every mission did that in some way or another. IR:  And how many mission stories did you have in Season 1? Owen:  I think 10 or 11 missions, and they all did that in some way. The thing was, we hadn't noticed! So we’d done a reasonably good job of making it different every time, but we said, ‘We have to do some different plots’. So we actively went into the new season saying ‘We're going to, at most, do one or two Save the Guy plots and everything else; we're going to really work hard to think of different things that the audience do’.  IR: So what caused you to end up making so many ‘Save the Guy’ missions in Season 1? Owen:  It had arisen, I think, because of how we staff the shows. We put three performers on each show. One of them will be the flight controller, who is the games master. They’re a performer, but they’re also making things happen behind the scenes. We have somebody who goes on with the crew at the beginning to train them in how to use the ship, and then we have an actor whose job it is to play whatever the prominent character is. One of the best ways to get a character onto the ship is to have them pick up or rescue somebody. That was one of our big takeaways - just spotting what we'd done by mistake.  As Tom was saying earlier, we also underestimated how invested returning audiences would get in not just the world of the show and the stories we're telling, but the characters on the Warspite that our actors played on the regular. We purposefully built in more plot points and story points that allowed for character developments and interesting things to happen to them. That was part of it as well. Photo: Alex Brenner IR: When we first spoke 18 months ago, you mentioned that you had ideas for the next four or five years’ worth of Bridge Command. Is that still the plan now that you’re some way down the road from opening? Owen:  Absolutely, yeah. What we found actually is that it's going to stretch further than we thought. We'd come up with quite a lot of ideas, and what we found, again, is part of that supertanker analogy of it taking a long time to steer Bridge Command in a particular direction. It's taken us longer to get some of that content out there because, actually, if we make new content, it doesn't just sit there for a couple of weeks or even a month. In order to get it through our whole fan base, it takes several months for people to play through all of those things. I think that elongates that timeline a little bit. We're anticipating at least being there until the end of next year. We'll see beyond that. I think how we're doing financially will dictate whether we extend. We have a 10-year lease on our site with a three- and five-year break. We'll make a decision at some point before the end of next year as to whether we want to go on past the end of that three-year break and into the five-year break. That will be purely a financial decision at that point. Is it still making enough money to cover its cost and also making money for our investors? I think that's the critical thing. They won't want to take the risk of us being there another two years and then dipping down into being loss-making. That's for the future to see, but we're pretty committed to being there throughout most, if not all, of next year. IR: Outside of Bridge Command, are there any new Parabolic shows on the way in the not-too-distant future? Owen:  There’s not much to say there, apart from there being some huge opportunities that have opened up, which we would love to take advantage of. Currently, we're not on any kind of ticking clock time scale to take advantage of those, which is great, so we can keep ploughing a lot of effort and attention into Bridge Command for as long as it needs it, but I think we're looking at least one more, really high-profile show in the next few years. I can't really say anything about what that will be. There's also the back catalogue of things. It's now been maybe six years since we did the last performance of For King and Country. I think that is still probably my favourite Parabolic show. There's been some talk of late about trying to bring that back again. I know certainly all the original cast feel as fond about it as I do, and it's been absent from the world for a while. There's a whole generation of new immersive theatre fans who've never seen it. I think it would be worth doing that again for people at some point if we can. IR: I think it’s fair to say you’ve got your hands full with Bridge Command at the moment. Owen:  Yeah. Any new Parabolic show will largely depend on Bridge Command. If we get to the end of next year and we're like ‘Okay, we've had a good time doing Bridge Command, but we think it's time to close’, then that would create space for us to work on something new. If Bridge Command goes on beyond the end of next year, then we may be looking at another couple of years before we make something new. It's a win-win as far as I'm concerned, because Bridge Command is a wonderful privilege to work on. There's nothing else out there that's quite like it, and as long as it can go on, I'd be very happy to be working on it. Photo: Alex Brenner Bridge Command is currently booking until 31st January 2026 in Vauxhall. For more information about the show, and to book tickets, visit bridgecommand.space

We grab our Orbs of Interaction and step into the Nether for Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue - a new immersive experience based on the best-selling video game. Photo: Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue Minecraft, the open-world sandbox game adored by kids worldwide, is far and away the best-selling video game of all time. In 2023, it was confirmed to have crossed over 300 million sales, massively outselling its closest rival, Grand Theft Auto V, by around 125 million sales, and despite being 14 years old, it has a monthly player count larger than the population of most countries. While fans of Minecraft around the world had been eagerly anticipating the opening of A Minecraft Movie, those in London had another reason to be excited: Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue has also just opened. Following a successful run in Dallas last year, this immersive Minecraft experience has its UK & European premiere at Corner Corner - a new venue in what's quickly becoming one of the defacto locations for new immersive experiences in London - Canada Water. Photo: Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue Aimed primarily at families, Villager Rescue invites guests to step into the Minecraft universe, where they're tasked with saving a group of villagers who have been infected by a zombie horde. Taking on the role of heroes, guests must work to craft a cure before time runs out while going through seven different rooms that are lifted directly from the game's diverse world. It all begins with the Orb of Interaction - a glowing handheld device that acts as a multi-tool throughout the experience. With the flick of a wrist, it's able to chop down trees, craft items, open chests, fight mobs, act as a bow and arrow and sword, and transport resources. Following an introductory video featuring a duo of Minecraft characters, Tobin and Dayo, guests enter a woodland-themed training room to learn how to use their Orbs first-hand. Photo: Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue With 360-degree projections on the walls and floor being rendered live in Unreal Engine, guests interact with the environment by waving or shaking their Orb of Interaction when standing on marked spots and can pick up items projected onto the floor by stepping on them. What these actions do depends on which item on the projected screens becomes highlighted - a tree will be chopped down for wood, an enemy knocked onto their back and despawned. The responsiveness of this project game world is pretty good, though sometimes you'll find yourself waving the Orb with nothing happening as a result. In what would soon become a running theme of our visit to Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue, the younger visitors in our larger group were running around collecting wood and stomping on projected apples with speed and dedication while the adults in the group took a more laid-back approach to resource gathering, likely aware that we'd need to preserve our energy for what was to come. With training complete, Tobin and Dayo guide guests through crafting tools and weapons by tapping their Orbs on chests or furnaces to collect resources and then placing them into the correct crafting table slots. It's a frantic game in which each crafting table is scored individually, allowing some light-hearted competition between guests. All of those resources are later used to expand and grow the village, which is presented on touch-screen displays in the following room. Photo: Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue Those already familiar with Minecraft will likely be aware of what happens to the village once nightfall comes - a zombie siege spells disaster for the village population and gives guests their quest for the remainder of the experience: save the villagers (hence the experience's title..) Moving through different Overworld biomes, including a forest, tundra, and mines, guests continue to gather further resources by using their Orbs of Interaction to open chests, chop down sugar canes and beat up spiders. At the show's midpoint, the most complicated room (for those unfamiliar with the game) has guests crafting Obsidian to build a portal into the Nether by combining water and lava. The Obsidian is transferred onto a portal until it fully lights up, which allows us to move out of the Overworld. Throughout the experience, there are a dozen or more real-world objects - like the portal - that respond to guests Orb's, which adds a much-needed element of tactility to the otherwise projection-heavy experience. Photo: Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue From there, it's a hop, skip and jump across a floor made of lava to fight a mob in an arcade-style game that has guests throwing felt 'snowballs' at a projection of Wither Skeletons, Zombie Pigman and finally, Blaze, in a fire-filled landscape. Regardless of people's familiarity with Minecraft, this portion of the experience is the most engaging and fun - it's also the only section that the Orb's are needed for. The previously mentioned energy conserved by the adults in our group was all but expelled following this section, with numerous comments about the experience being like a workout between older visitors. The younger guests showed no signs of flagging though... Rounding off the experience, all of our gathered resources are brewed into a potion to save the villagers, with a practical Brewing Stand letting off smoke to show its complete. All visitors to Villager Rescue, regardless of age, are given a unique 25-digit code to redeem a Minecraft Experience Digital Cape in-game, which is a nice souvenir of their visit for Minecraft players. Photo: Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue Judging by how much fun the younger members of our group were having, Villager Rescue delivers exactly what it promised: an opportunity for fans to step into the world they've spent countless hours exploring digitally in real life. While the experience might not convert non-gamers, it's packed with dozens of nods and small references to the original game that will delight long-time players. The opportunity to run around and play within such a faithfully crafted environment will also have a lot of younger die-hard fans smiling from ear to ear. If you have kids who love Minecraft, you probably don't need this review to tell you if they'll enjoy it - as they almost certainly will. For adults who are unfamiliar with the game and are without kids, the likes of Immersive Gamebox or Escape Arcade will likely offer a more rewarding (though equally exhausting) experience. Photos: Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue ★★★ Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue runs at Corner Corner in Canada Water until 4th January 2026. Tickets are priced from £27.00 for Adults and £22.00 for Children. To find out more and book tickets, visit minecraftexperience.com/london For more reviews of immersive experiences like Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue, check out our recent reviews .

This large-scale immersive show from Sage & Jester is visually stunning but buckles under the weight of its narrative shortcomings. Photo: Helen Murray In a cavernous warehouse on the bank of the River Thames in Deptford sits STOREHOUSE, the debut immersive promenade show from Sage & Jester. Anyone who's even mildly invested in London's immersive scene will have seen mention of the show over the last few months, with the company having hosted an extensive pre-show campaign, which included a roaming pop-up experience in the form of STOREHOUSE Truck , a string of events at The Pleasance in North London featuring conversations with the likes of Rachel Parris and Jamie Bartlett, and heaps of marketing on both social media and tube posters across the city. If London's immersive scene had been waiting for a new blockbuster production during Punchdrunk's downtime following The Burnt City and Viola's Room, STOREHOUSE, at first, appeared to be it. When first announced, it was pitched as 'one of the UK's most artistically daring and large-scale immersive theatre shows'. With a creative team made up of some heavyweight names, including Sophie Larsmon, Donnacadh O'Brian, and Caro Murphy, STOREHOUSE arrived with significant pedigree. Sage & Jester founder Liana Patarkatsishvili also has first-hand experience of the impact those in power can wield through disinformation after IMEDIA, an independent television station in Georgia, which was founded by her father, was seized by the Georgian government and used to broadcast fake news in 2010. Ahead of opening, all signs pointed to this show looking to tackle misinformation with a nuanced take from lived experience. Sadly, despite STOREHOUSE having some exceptionally beautiful spaces that are as detailed as they are huge, the show's narrative seems to have nothing new to say about the digital age, the impact of misinformation on everyday people, and our ability to fight against it. Photo: Helen Murray Within the world of the show, STOREHOUSE was founded in 1983 with a clear mission: to catalogue and archive every piece of information ever shared online and assign it a numerical value based on the quality. While the overall quality of the world's online posts has taken a dive since the creation of social media, all of this work was nonetheless in aid of something, 'The Great Aggregation', a seismic event due to have taken place on 1st January 2025 and provide a universal truth for all of humanity. It'll come as no surprise that The Great Aggregation never materialised, and as one of the show's characters put it, the whole thing was an 'epic fail'. While the facility was seemingly chugging along fine throughout the 90s and 00s, the workers at STOREHOUSE, who are made up of caretakers, book binders and stackers, have been struggling to keep up with the workload in recent years thanks to the explosion of social media. On top of that, the place is beginning to fall apart under the pressure. Ink is leaking from the ceilings, books are growing mouldy and covered in strange Rorschach test-like spots, and the walls of the facility have started to emit ominous whispers. In an attempt to get STOREHOUSE back on track amid declining staff morale, a recruitment drive is underway, and the audience, acting as new trustees, are invited to tour the facility to learn more about the work that's been done on-site for the last 40 years. Photo: Helen Murray The scale of STOREHOUSE is pretty staggering and easily dwarfs any other immersive production in recent memory. It's a positive step for London's immersive scene to have another company creating work at the scale often reserved for the likes of Secret Cinema and Punchdrunk, and while each group of audience members will only experience around 1/4 of the venue over their 90-minute experience, every square foot of Deptford Storehouse's gargantuan footprint has been put to use, with four builds of the main show space filling the building. Alice Help's production design, which is far and away the best part of STOREHOUSE, rivals that of The Burnt City when it comes to the kind of small details immersive fans lap up. Handwritten notes are scattered throughout the book binders' room alongside a host of 80s tech and period-accurate paraphernalia; the whispering stacks - complete with their shrines for daily worship - are akin to a cathedral made of sheep's wool and towers over audiences, while the willow stacks, which have been crafted and shaped using real willow, feel like stepping inside a vast, multi-layered woodland den. Underfoot, you find natural material like bark and sand, which adds further tactility to spaces already drenched in unique, organic materials. Photo: Helen Murray Coupled with some wonderfully responsive lighting design from Ben Donoghue, the show offers up the chance to explore and interact with spaces that are on a scale rarely seen within an immersive show. The exceptional design on display in all of STOREHOUSE's spaces creates an otherworldly, magical feeling that stands alongside Viola's Room in terms of evoking the senses, even if it easily eclipses Punchdrunk's recent offering in terms of scope. The final moments of STOREHOUSE see audiences ascend above the ground floor level they've spent so much of the show exploring to reveal the true scale of the production. It's so big you can barely make out the other end of the building, and looking across the entirety of Deptford Storehouse from above, it's immediately clear just how much care and attention has gone into building this world and how big a cheque it must have required to create. Photo: Helen Murray On the flip side, the story STOREHOUSE offers to audiences is deeply underbaked. There's a huge focus placed on the inner workings of the fictional facility, which is occupied by one-dimensional characters who don't seem to have any interest in the nuance of such pressing ideas as fake news, misinformation, propaganda and deep fakes. There's passing mention given to real-world examples of police brutality and racial injustice courtesy of stacker Rami (Scott Karim), and bookbinder Andie (Dawn Butler) shares a story of their big break in the art world never materialising due to cancel culture, but as soon as they begin to approach how these events impacted them on a personal level, they're interrupted by either a blaring alarm or another STOREHOUSE worker, who swiftly changes the subject. Those trying to keep up with the storyline of STOREHOUSE will find themselves bogged down in lengthy monologues that are pure exposition, covering in detail the inter-departmental politics of the facility. There's no mention of why governments, or those in power, would want to deploy misinformation and fake news, the impact it has on communities and everyday people, and how it's shaped our online spaces. Photo: Helen Murray With the show offering a frustratingly basic opinion on some of the biggest issues of our time, it's a surprise that Liana's Patarkatsishvili first-hand experience with these issues doesn't seem to have influenced the writing at all, with the story being told in STOREHOUSE failing to show the personal impact such campaigns have on everyday people. Before Sage & Jester launched, much of the company's creative team, including Liana Patarkatsishvili, operated under the banner of Medea. At last year's Edinburgh Fringe, they presented an audio experience called Illuminated Lies , which was made up of voice recordings from individuals who have been personally affected by misinformation and fake news. Less than a year later, and with a space infinitely bigger than the back of the black cab in which Illuminated Lies took place, to see the fallout and real-world consequences that these misinformation campaigns can have on individuals be completely absent from STOREHOUSE feels like both a step backwards and a glaring omission. Photo: Helen Murray In terms of interactivity, STOREHOUSE also offers very little for audiences to do and next to no way in which to influence the events that unfold during the show. There are a couple of small fetch quests in which audiences either search the space for postcards, listen to and note down the whispers coming from the walls, or try to match Rorschach-like ink spots from within the pages of bound books. There's a more substantial chance for trustees to try their hand at being stackers, which is soundtracked by Bucks Fizz's Making Your Mind Up, and involves running around the willow-lined stacks, but beyond that and some light interaction answering broad questions like 'What changes would you implement to STOREHOUSE?' and 'What inspires hope?', the audience are largely passive throughout. The combination of this light interaction with the underdeveloped story completely removes any emotional investment in the story on display throughout STOREHOUSE and makes the later revelations in the show's finale void of any real stakes. What should be a rousing call to arms, with audiences ready to get on board with the idea of dismantling the systems deployed by those in power, instead receives a muted response from most of the crowd. While the narrative of STOREHOUSE diminishes the impact of the overall experience, there's a lot to enjoy in experiencing the show's vast size and rich attention to detail. With a huge budget and an even bigger venue, this is immersive theatre on the grandest possible scale, and we should try to savour it when it so rarely comes along, shortcomings and all. ★★★ STOREHOUSE runs until 20th September at Deptford Storehouse. Tickets are priced from £37.50. For more information and to book tickets, visit sageandjester.com For more reviews of immersive experiences like STOREHOUSE, check out our recent Reviews .

The critically acclaimed immersive sci-fi adventure will launch its next instalment this Spring. Photo: Zoe Flint Bridge Command, the immersive sci-fi experience that brings together the best of live theatre and gaming technology, has announced today that its next season will open in May. Audience members will take on new challenges, tackle fresh dilemmas and navigate even higher-stakes scenarios than before as they transform into the crew of a starship travelling through the galaxy on a mission to save humanity from an emerging existential danger. Following on from the first instalment’s 22nd Century setting where years of conflict had led to the launch of the United Confederation Navy (UCN) and a new era of space exploration, this next chapter plunges crews into uncharted peril with mysterious incidents in deep space putting humanity in the path of a dangerous new enemy. With an extinction-level threat looming, members of the UCN must confront the unknown before it’s too late. Photo: Gabriel Burns Artistic Director Owen Kingston said: Bridge Command really is the closest you can get to being the star of your own sci-fi tv series. The episodic nature of the show allows us to sustain an ongoing story for our audiences over multiple visits, where they get to shape the story as it progresses with real consequences for the decisions they make. This new season of stories lets us take that to the next level, providing fresh antagonists and new plot points for returning visitors, and an even more refined experience for those coming for the first time. Though the current season of Bridge Command will close in May, the core elements of the experience will remain with participants able to choose from four distinct mission types: Military, focusing on ship-to-ship combat; Exploration, in which players tackle the mysteries of space; Intrigue, involving espionage and investigative challenges; and Diplomacy, which will find players navigating high-stakes political situations. Participants can take on one of up to fourteen unique roles — ranging from Communications Officer to ship’s Captain — within four specialised teams: Operations, Science, Engineering, and Command. Participants will encounter characters played by professional actors from Parabolic Theatre, who will help to drive the action forward. Photo: Gabriel Burns Bridge Command blends live theatre and gaming into an immersive experience where participants become the stars of their own sci-fi adventure. Set in one of two custom-built starships, the experience is powered by bridge simulation software. Every event, from enemy attacks to system malfunctions, affects the physical set, creating sparks and chaos. Audiences are fully immersed without the need for VR or wearable tech. Each visit's data is recorded and carried over to future missions, allowing crews to shape their own evolving sci-fi adventure. The experience opened last March to critical acclaim and recently marked its one-year anniversary. Chief Operating Officer Tom Black said: The story continues, the world gets bigger, and the best part is that even if you haven’t played the previous missions, the new ones will bring you into the story so you won't feel like you missed out. There’s truly nothing else out there like this Photo: Gabriel Burns As well as the new season, Bridge Command’s Mess Bar is currently open to anyone looking for an other-worldly evening. The £10 entry fee includes a free house cocktail worth £15 or other drink and a chance to dress up in one of the show’s flight suits. Also recently launched was a corporate away-day package for companies looking for the ultimate test of teamwork, communication and problem-solving. Parabolic Theatre was founded by Owen Kingston in 2016 to push the boundaries of interactive and immersive storytelling. Since then, they have been creating dynamic, audience-driven experiences that go beyond spectacle, tackling social and political upheavals through innovative, participatory theatre. Their productions place audiences at the heart of the action—whether influencing a government in crisis, responding to a large-scale invasion, or investigating a drifting starship. Interactivity is central to their work, giving participants real agency to shape narratives, engage with performers, and explore the world around them. Photo: Gabriel Burns Bridge Command is currently booking until 31st January 2025 in Vauxhall. For more information about the show, and to book tickets, visit bridgecommand.space

Parabolic Theatre’s new immersive starship simulator delivers an exhilarating and unique experience for visitors that rewards exploration and, above all else, good communication. Our review of Bridge Command... Photo: Alex Brenner Bridge Command, the latest immersive experience from Parabolic Theatre, officially opened its sliding doors in Vauxhall this past week. A reworking of the company's 2019 production, the show places visitors in charge of their own spacecraft, allowing them to navigate the vastness of the galaxy, engage in combat and negotiate with enemy factions. It's one of the most technologically advanced immersive shows to open in London in recent years and takes the decision-focused, responsive style of immersion Parabolic Theatre has always been best known for to new heights, far exceeding anything they've previously produced in terms of both complexity and scale. Back in 2019, Parabolic launched the original version of Bridge Command at COLAB Factory in Borough. Produced on a sh oestring bud get, using whatever props and set dressing they had lying around, the show was, by their own admission, pretty rough around the edges from a set design perspective. Appropriately, the show’s budget had instead largely been invested in the technology and backend systems that powered the experience, enabling them to produce a show that guests loved and found incredibly engaging. Allowing people to pilot their own starship and set off into the vastness of space made it the fastest-selling show in the company's history at the time. During this run, Bridge Command attracted the attention of investors, who helped fund the reworked, supersized version of the show now open in Vauxhall. Photo: Alex Brenner Warp forward to 2024, and in the few short months since the show soft-opened in March, it's clear Bridge Command has developed a loyal fanbase. Outside the venue, attendees introduce themselves to each other and connect over discussing their previous missions aboard both the UCN Takanami and UCN Havock. More than perhaps every other immersive show open in London right now, Bridge Command demands you get to know everyone else is in your group in order to succeed, with an upcoming mission to space serving as a pretty good icebreaker... Once inside, you're instructed to select a flight suit to wear for your mission. Everyone taking part in the experience is offered either a Bridge Command jumpsuit or bomber jacket to wear, which has room set aside for everyone’s current rank and ship name to be velcroed onto. First-time visitors sport the patches denoting that they’re Ensigns, the lowest rung on the United Confederation Navy ladder, while more experienced guests can have higher ranks and other patches denoting specific achievements. This is the first introduction to the multi-level progression system that Bridge Command has built into it, which is designed to reward repeat visits and encourage exploration of the show world. With everyone suited up, you're ushered into the teleporter, a huge white circular room that takes you from 2024 Earth to 2180 Space in a matter of moments. We won't reveal what tricks are being used here, but it's a wonderfully designed transitional space that makes it clear Parabolic Theatre isn't messing around when it comes to delivering on the promise of a high-budget immersive space experience. Photo: Alex Brenner Emerging in The Mess, the UCS Warspite's on-site bar, which is decked out with interactive terminals and relics of previous UNC missions, you'll find yourself alongside fellow pilots, engineers, and communications officers eager to celebrate their recent successes or calm their nerves before being deployed. In total, there are four different mission types on offer within Bridge Command: Diplomacy, Intrigue, Military and Exploration, all of which will see guests acting on behalf of UCN in one of the numerous Officer roles visitors must select from. Ranging from Helm to Weapons, Radar, Engineerings and Comms, as well as, of course, Captain or First Officer. All of them are important in their own way, and things can easily go wrong at any one station, leading to a knock-on effect across the ship. For our visit, we were taking on an Intrigue mission that on the surface sounded simple enough. All that was required of us was to deliver a military officer onto a nearby ship nestled inside a cluster of asteroids, assist them in retrieving a datapad, and then leave the area without being seen. Given Bridge Command takes inspiration from episodic sci-fi series like Star Trek, and dropping someone off at a ship just to take them home would be a very dull episode of TV, it's little surprise that things got a bit more complicated and action-heavy as our mission progressed, with alarms blaring, sparks flying and enemy ships coming at us from all directions. Both the UCN Havock, and UCN Takanami have complex systems that need constant attention and careful resource management. Besides the touchscreen consoles at every station, the crew must interact with numerous physical elements to keep the ship running smoothly. If the ship's overall energy levels run too low the Fuel Cells need removing and replacing, the Crystal Resonators that maintain the ship's shields can become destabilised, leaving the ship defenceless, and the Overcurrent Protectors may also need swapping out. With resources being used up faster in situations like combat and travelling at warp speed, it's a delicate balance to manage them all. Photo: Alex Brenner On paper, all of this may sound incredibly overwhelming. Thankfully for first-time visitors, there’s time set aside for explanations of every role before things kick off in earnest. You won’t be experts in your roles by any means, but the UCN seems to encourage on-the-job learning and embracing your mistakes - even if your crewmates might not. While the added pressure of knowing that if you can’t respond quickly and do what is needed, you may well become the weakest link ramps up the tension as you begin your mission, all of the roles are manageable and on the right side of challenging to stay on top of. As previously mentioned, one of the biggest parts of Bridge Command, and honestly the hardest thing to stay on top of, isn’t the numerous consoles, terminals, and screens, but the communication between players. When your crew is all on the same page and the group's instructions to one another are clear, progressing through the show's story is an exhilarating experience. Information and updates will fly across the room constantly as everyone operates as a cohesive unit, and obstacles like enemy ships are soon little more than debris.  On the flip side, these moments can easily spill over into disaster if communication falls apart. At one point during our visit, we collided with a large asteroid despite numerous shouts of 'Asteroid!' from all corners of the bridge. On this occasion, it took too long for the Helm to react, and our ship's hull took such a large amount of damage that the Engineering team had to leap into action to mend it. While it was drilled into us in the briefing that everyone’s actions will affect what happens in our mission, this collision with the asteroid confirmed that point in a very real way.  Photo: Alex Brenner Parabolic Theatre has always focused on creating experiences that give audiences agency and respond to visitors' decisions. These decisions - both good and bad - have lasting impacts on the narrative, with the show designed to respond and bend around players' decisions, however left-field they may be. While in previous Parabolic shows, most notably with Crisis? What Crisis? and For King and Country, this was largely confined to each individual visit. In Bridge Command, these decisions have longer-lasting implications. Each mission within Bridge Command has no set path to follow and gives visitors a huge amount of freedom to decide how best to approach any situation. The show then responds to those choices on the fly, meaning every version of a mission can have wildly different outcomes. All of this information is logged and will later inform what happens in subsequent visits. If, like us, you decided not to hand over important intel to UCN Intelligence at the end of your mission, that decision may well have consequences in the future for both you and your team. Photo: Alex Brenner Additionally, the show's individual progression system allows you to rise up the ranks of UCN over time. While we remained Ensigns with single-stripped shoulder patches after our first mission, those in the same position will in time progress to higher ranks based on how much time they spend aboard the ship and how well they perform while on the bridge. During our mission debrief, our Radar operator received their first promotion, prompting cheers and applause from the rest of the crew - it was a surprisingly emotional moment for not only them but the rest of the group that they’d just worked alongside.   For fans of interactive storytelling and sci-fi adventures, Bridge Command is an essential experience. With a level of freedom that is almost unparalleled, there's little else out there anywhere in the galaxy that comes close to what Bridge Command offers. We'll no doubt be reporting for duty again in the not-too-distant future to continue exploring the outer reaches of space and get the promotion that's so far eluded us... Photos: Alex Brenner ★★★★ ½ Bridge Command is currently booking until 31st January 2026 in Vauxhall. For more information about the show, and to book tickets visit bridgecommand.space For more reviews of shows like Bridge Command, check out other recent immersive reviews here .