This week, former Coincidence members Zachtronics released UVS Nirmana, a new “Zach-like” puzzler that pretty much spaghettified my synapses, despite being billed as “medium difficulty.” It puts you in control of a monastic spaceship embarked on a pilgrimage across the galaxy, imbued with references to dharmic religions. During your travels, you will help other civilizations resolve their philosophical dilemmas using a cosmic reactor that functions like a musical sequencer. You will connect pipes and components to resolve the relationships between terms such as “shape”, “amen” and “svaha”doing your best to minimize “flow”.
As I played the first few puzzles, I felt a mixture of excitement and guilt. Excitement, because even though I barely understand what’s going on, I love the ritual absurdity of, for example, trying to distill “light” and “sound” into “thought” by means of valves and relays. And guilt, because it turns out the original founder of Zachtronics, Zach Barth, told me about this game two years ago, and I forgot. Here, very belatedly, is the second half of this 2024 interview, continuing Zachtronic’s journey through the strange and arbitrary cosmos of licensed adaptations.
Barth told me about what would become UVS Nirmana when discussing an abandoned Zachtronics pitch for a Warhammer 40,000 game, launched during the development of Magnum Opus in 2017. The 40k pitch failed for a variety of reasons: the cost of purchasing the rights from Games Workshop, doubts about the politics of the setting, and concerns about sacrificing too much creative control to work on a licensed property. Despite this latter concern, Barth and his colleagues set out to deliver another adaptation of a science fiction universe that couldn’t be further from Warhammer 40,000, at least in terms of starship filth.
“I think we all loved Star Trek, unlike 40k,” Barth told me in 2024. “Even one of our artists who does all the UI stuff – he had the idea of making a Star Trek game, because Star Trek has a good UI. Famously, The Next Generation, with all the okudagrams and all that stuff is pretty exciting if you’re a graphic designer.”
However, the studio’s initial overtures to the series’ creators came to nothing. “Star Trek licensing is crazy,” Barth commented. “Because for the longest time, movie licensing was with one company, Paramount, and then TV licensing was CBS. And I know the people who made the MMO Star Trek had a lot of problems with that – originally they only had one license for all the TV shows, and years later they finally managed to sign a deal with the people who got the movie licenses, and they were able to add all the characters from the movie, the uniforms and everything else.”
After failing to get a response from Trek’s owners, Zach and his colleagues turned to what they considered the next best thing: a game based on Seth Macfarlane’s Star Trek homage The Orville, which Barth says is better than many real Star Trek shows. After contacting Fox, the licensee, they received a “hilarious” slideshow of shows and films, obviously intended for any type of merchandising or adaptation project imaginable. “They say, yes, we have The Orville, but we have a lot of stuff,” Barth said. “Look at all our IP addresses, 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 a shift in 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 externally, and there are reorganizations and all of a sudden they go from having game studios to not having game studios,” he told me. “And Disney has done a lot of things along these lines: Do they make their own games or not? As an outsider, you have very little knowledge and you’re kind of at the mercy of their internal politics of the moment.”
Ultimately, Fox seemed willing to license The Orville for the adaptation, but they also wanted an exorbitant fee. “We were just like, my God, the Orville is not even going to bring anyone in,” Barth said. “We could just make our own fake Star Trek and it would be as good as The Orville, because that’s all they did: make their own fake Star Trek.”
Thus, the chain of reasoning that ultimately led to UVS Nirmana. But before heading off in their own direction, Barth and his colleagues decided to make one more attempt at securing the rights to the Trekverse. “I reconnected with the Star Trek people and I was successful.”
Zachtronics wanted to create a systems-driven Star Trek engineering puzzler, set specifically alongside the events of The Next Generation. “It’s like you’re an engineer on the lower decks,” Barth said. “They’re always talking about oh, we need to get 2% more efficiency out of something, and this looks like a Zachtronics drive, of course. Pull a little more, make it a little faster.” The developers imagined the story of a basic crew member on a lesser-known starship, picking up gossip about the Enterprise while typing on their terminal.
The Star Trek licensing team was “totally ready to play ball” at first, Barth said, but was less happy to use 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. “Lower Decks had just come out, and so they were really excited (about it),” Barth recalls. “They literally had stickers of the characters and it was like, look at these little guys, you can have them in your game.”
Barth had warmed up to The Lower Decks, after being “pretty cold” at first, but he found the show’s inside jokes grating and didn’t much like the cast. “They’re not big characters. They’re very simplistic – it’s for a cartoon, you know, it’s for kids, sort of, (and) we’re making games for adults.” The conversation stopped from there.
It took a while for Barth and his colleagues to begin development of UVS Nirmana, after washing their hands of Star Trek. When I spoke to him in 2024 – a few years after Barth abandoned Zachtronics, with Coincidence starting in 2025 – it was still just a “side project”, pursuing some of the ideas for a Star Trek game alongside an original narrative framework.
Barth mentioned Buddhism in passing during our interview, but I admit that I don’t clearly understand how religion and philosophy became so central to what can still be described as a warp core tuning simulator. Maybe I’ll come back and ask, once I have my amens and svahas up and running with 102% effectiveness. In the meantime, you can find UVS Nirmana on Steam.
