This week the former Zachtronics folk of Coincidence released U.V.S. Nirmana, a new “Zach-like” puzzler that has fairly spaghettified my synapses, despite being billed as “medium-difficulty”. It puts you in charge of a monastic spacecraft embarked on a pilgrimage through the galaxy, steeped in references to Dharmic religions. During your voyages, you’ll help other civilisations with their philosophical dilemmas using a cosmic reactor that functions like a music sequencer. You’ll join up pipes and components to resolve relationships between terms like “form”, “amen” and “svaha”, doing your best to minimise “flux”.
Playing the opening few puzzles, I felt a mixture of excitement and guilt. Excitement, because while I barely understand what’s going on, I love the ritual obtuseness of, say, trying to distil “light” and “sound” into “thought” by means of valves and relays. And guilt, because it turns out original Zachtronics founder Zach Barth told me about this game two years ago, and I forgot. Here, very belatedly, is the second half of that interview from 2024, continuing Zachtronic’s journey through the strange and arbitrary cosmos of licensed adaptations.
Barth told me about what would become U.V.S. Nirmana while discussing an abandoned Zachtronics pitch for a Warhammer 40,000 game, tossed around during development of Opus Magnum in 2017. The 40k pitch fell through for a range of reasons: the cost of buying the rights from Games Workshop, misgivings about the setting’s politics, and worries about sacrificing too much creative control in order to work on a licensed property. Despite the last concern, Barth and his colleagues proceeded to pitch another adaptation of a sci-fi universe that couldn’t be further from Warhammer 40,000, at least in terms of the grottiness of the starships.
“I think we all liked Star Trek, unlike 40k,” Barth told me back in 2024. “Even one of our artists who does all of our UI stuff – he was into the idea of making a Star Trek game, because Star Trek has good UI. Famously, The Next Generation, with all the okudagrams and stuff – that’s kind of exciting if you’re a graphic designer.”
The studio’s initial overtures to the show’s creators went nowhere, however. “Star Trek licensing is crazy,” Barth commented. “Because for the longest time, movie licensing was through one company, Paramount, and then TV licensing was CBS. And I know the people who made the Star Trek MMO ran into a lot of troubles with this – originally, they only had a license for all the TV shows, and then years later, they finally managed to ink a deal with the people who did the movie licensing, and they could add all the movie characters and uniforms and stuff.”
After failing to get a reply from the owners of Trek, Zach and his colleagues pivoted to what they considered the next best thing – a game based on Seth Macfarlane’s Star Trek homage The Orville, which Barth feels is better than a lot of actual Star Trek shows. Having approached license holder Fox, they were sent a “hilarious” slide deck of shows and films, evidently intended for any kind of merchandising or adaptation project conceivable. “They’re like: yeah, we have The Orville, but we have a lot of things,” Barth said. “Look at all of our IPs, like Thelma and Louise.”
This was around the time Disney acquired Fox, and Barth speculated that the confusing response from the licensing team might reflect changing priorities at the top. “Sometimes [big media companies] decide they want to make their own games in-house, and sometimes, they want to do it out of house, and there’s reorgs and suddenly they go from having game studios to not having game studios,” he told me. “And Disney’s done a lot of this – do they make their own games, or not? As somebody on the outside, you have very little insight, and you’re kind of just at the whim of whatever their internal politics are at the time.”
Ultimately, Fox did seem willing to license The Orville for adaptation, but they also wanted an eye-watering fee. “We were just like, god, The Orville is not even gonna bring anybody in,” Barth said. “We could just make our own fake Star Trek and it would be just as good as The Orville, because that’s all they did – make their own fake Star Trek.”
Thus, the chain of reasoning that eventually led to U.V.S. Nirmana. But before heading off in their own direction, Barth and his colleagues decided to have one more crack at landing the rights to the Trekverse. “I got back in touch with the Star Trek people, and actually got through.”
Zachtronics wanted to make a system-driven Star Trek engineering puzzler, set specifically alongside the events of The Next Generation. “It’s like, what if you’re an engineer on the lower decks,” Barth said. “They’re always talking about oh, we gotta get an extra two percent efficiency out of something, and that sounds like a Zachtronics player, for sure. Squeeze out a little bit more, make it a little bit faster.” The developers imagined a story about a rank-and-file crew member on a less-known starship, catching the odd piece of gossip about the Enterprise while tapping at their terminal.
Star Trek’s licensing team were “totally game to play ball” at first, Barth said, but they were less happy about using The Next Generation as a setting. Instead, they offered Zachtronics the chance to make a comedy, based on the animated TV show The Lower Decks. “The Lower Decks had just come out, and so they were really gung-ho [about that],” Barth recalled. “They literally had stickers of the characters and it was just like, look at these little guys, you can have these in your game.”
Barth had warmed to The Lower Decks, after being “pretty cold” on it at first, but he found the show’s inside jokes grating, and didn’t much like the cast. “They’re not great characters. They’re very simplistic – it’s for a cartoon show, you know, it’s for kids, kind of, [and] we make games for adults.” The conversation fizzled out from there.
It took a while for Barth and his colleagues to begin development of U.V.S. Nirmana, after washing their hands of Star Trek. When I spoke to him in 2024 – a couple of years after Barth shelved Zachtronics, with Coincidence starting up in 2025 – it was still just “a side project”, pursuing some of the ideas for a Star Trek game alongside an original narrative setting.
Barth did mention Buddhism in passing during our interview, but I confess, I’m not clear how religion and philosophy became so central to what can still just about be characterised as a warp core tuning simulator. Perhaps I’ll go back and ask, once I’ve got my amens and svahas up and running at 102% efficiency. In the meantime, you can find U.V.S. Nirmana on Steam.
