Ok, I had a fundamental misunderstanding of the persistence and once I replaced the gameScene var with this it started working as expected. let gameScene = GameScene(size: WKInterfaceDevice.current().screenBounds.size, something: 1)

You can use SKScene on WatchOS, but curiously SKScene lacks didMove(..), so only sceneDidLoad() is available. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/spritekit/skscene/1519607-didmove I am having trouble with using SwiftUI as the wrapper and adding in gestures. It seems to lose the reference to the SKScene when SwiftUI does a full view update. I wanted to leave this here if anyone else is having trouble with showing a SKScene on WatchOS. There definitely are gaps that I feel make SwiftUI with SpriteKit untenable for real development. import SwiftUI import SpriteKit struct GameView: View {struct GameView: View {     var body: some View {         SpriteView(scene: gameScene)             .ignoresSafeArea()     }     var gameScene: GameScene {         let scene = GameScene(size: WKInterfaceDevice.current().screenBounds.size, something: 1)         scene.scaleMode = .fill         return scene     } } struct GameView_Previews: PreviewProvider {     static var previews: some View {         GameView()     } }