This Earthly Sphere
ImmerzionCo’s new game is visceral, brilliant… and claustrophobic.
When we try to think about the Earth, almost all of us find ourselves falling into a cognitive gap. In lived experience, the world can feel near-infinite. In abstract, we can appreciate, even calculate, it’s limits. But sensing the reality of a planet tightly bound… our brains have a hard time with that.
Sphere, the latest immersive reality from the groundbreaking team at ImmerzionCo, drives right for that gap and pulls us behind it, into a virtual world that’s sensory, astonishing and claustrophobically finite.
The gameplay is simple. Reach out to hit start and you find yourself standing in a large meadow of tall golden grass, ringed by trees, on the edge of which flows a little creek. You can hear birdsong, the breeze and rustlings in the grass. If you look at yourself, you see that you’re clothed in a garment made of small spotted animal pelts, sewn together. “You are hungry,” a disembodied voice chimes behind you.
As you begin to explore, you find that the forest is not large. You walk for no more than five minutes — stopping from time to time to admire the craftsmanship of the VR — before you come to the end of the world. Literally. Go far enough in any direction, and you come to a wall of glass. It curves in above you towards the sky. Outside the glass are night and stars, even if it’s daytime where you stand. Follow the wall, and after a time you find yourself back where you began. You are, you suddenly grok, in a glass sphere. Your world is a bubble.
There are no explained goals, no tutorials, no walk-throughs. Every so often, you get hungry or sleepy. The seasons change. If you get cold enough, hungry enough or sleepy enough, you can get sick. If you get sick, you may die, alone in your small home.
As you play, you begin to realize that this is no Potemkin forest, but a world in which every object can be moved, broken, changed, even nurtured. Rocks can be broken into tools. Wood can be set on fire or piled into a lean-to. Small marmot-like creatures can be hunted, skinned and cooked. From time to time, berries and mushrooms spring up like gifts from the Terrarium Gods.
As you play more, you begin to realize something else: the landscape does not refresh. What you do early in any game continues to echo through the rest of the game. Chop down all the huge old trees, and only brush and saplings grow back, slowly. Fish the stream too often and you’ll find there are no more fish, and they never come back. You can hunt the small animals into extinction, deplete your supply of chipping stones, even crack the glass wall and hear the air whoosh out of your world. What you can’t do is undo these small catastrophes.
In fact, only with the most skillful gameplay can you keep your little sphere healthy for more than a few in-world years. My longest game, so far, was about 102 seasons before I found myself on an increasingly barren plain, choking with dusty drought, marked by withered stems poking from the cracked soil, the sky a terrifying ochre red.
I have a friend who’s gone almost 300 turns, but his sphere’s ecosystem is showing ominous signs of wilt. “I worry,” he told me, “that’s it’s only a matter of time.”
No one knows how long you can keep a little finite planet going without actually understanding its rules.
Perhaps that is exactly the point.
Sphere, by ImmerzionCo, November 2026; $79.00 on Amazon, Steam, Alibaba and in the Apple Store. Click to purchase. Please don’t forget to recommend this review to other readers.
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