The former Zachtronics team just released a new space engineering game

U.V.S. Nirmana is out today on PC, Mac, and Linux via Steam. The engineering puzzle game comes from Coincidence, a studio made up of former Zachtronics developers, and is published by Klei Entertainment.

Zach Barth and his team formally closed the Zachtronics label in 2022 after releasing Last Call BBS. They eventually reformed under the name Coincidence. The new studio operates as a flexible cooperative framework. This structure lets the team work on digital games, educational software, and physical tabletop projects. They released the 1980s-themed automation game Kaizen: A Factory Story last year. Now they are back in space.

Retirement didn't take

The new project involves managing energy flows aboard the Unreturning Void Ship Nirmana. It is an ornate spacecraft traveling toward the edge of the universe. Players encounter distant civilizations along the journey and solve their problems using engineering.

Barth's previous games practically invented their own subgenre. These open-ended programming puzzles do not have one correct answer. The game simply provides a set of tools and a required output. You have to figure out how to bridge the gap without creating a mess of overlapping logic gates.

In U.V.S. Nirmana, players build pipe networks to route energy from the ship's vega drive to various systems. The mechanics revolve around conduits, signals, and control matrices. The interface elements still look like circuit boards, but they route abstract concepts like wealth, name, and power instead of just chemical bonds or raw data.

The primary goal is to optimize these circuits to minimize flux. A built-in leaderboard ranks solutions based on width, height, and flux. This is the exact same histogram system used in games like SpaceChem and Opus Magnum. You can finish a puzzle, feel smart, and then immediately look at the graph to realize thousands of other players built a smaller, faster machine.

Scope and scale

Coincidence estimates the main campaign takes around four to six hours to complete. This is shorter than some of their massive legacy titles. The playtime scales heavily based on how much time you spend optimizing early solutions. The developers also included tools for players to design and share custom puzzles.

The visual style shifts away from the sterile corporate interfaces of Shenzhen I/O. U.V.S. Nirmana uses a distinct pixel-art aesthetic with mystical, temple-like architecture floating against dark space backgrounds. The aesthetic matches the game's premise of a pilgrimage.

Mandatory solitaire

Past Zachtronics games almost always included a built-in solitaire minigame. U.V.S. Nirmana continues that tradition with a sci-fi adaptation of Oware. It is a traditional mancala game that involves dropping stones into a series of bowls arranged in a circle. The developers say this variant rewards insight into the future and an understanding of cause and effect.

Klei Entertainment has been picking up mechanically dense indie projects through their Klei Publishing label over the last few years. U.V.S. Nirmana fits right in with their catalog alongside games like Beastieball and Mind Over Magic. The unexpected return of the post-level histogram is a welcome surprise.