"They were totally game to play ball": how Zachtronics almost made a Star Trek engineering sim

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.