First of all, let’s celebrate the fact that Pragmata is a r✱eal game. Capcom’s upcoming science fiction shooter was first announced during the PlayStation 5 reveal stream in 2020. We only saw a cinematic trailer back then (), which didn’t tell us much, other than that it was going to launch in 2022. That release date shifted to 2023, which then eventually turned into an indefinite postponement. I was expecting Pragmata to be quietly cancelled, until I ꦯfound myself playing it at this year’s Summer Game Fest Play Days event.
Pragmata Could Be Ahead Of🧔 Its Time If This One Line From The State Of Play Trailer Rings True
The State of Play trailer name-checks tech we didn't know about when the game was first rev💯ealed in 2020.
So yes, Pragmata is real, and though it still doesn’t have a more specific release date than sometime in 2026, it at least seems like it’s coming along nicely. I💟 still have a lot of questions, but it’s nice to finally have a pretty good idea of what Pragmata is, and in classic Capcom fashion, it’s pretty dang weird.
Hack And Shoot, Shoot And Hack
The main gimmick of Pragmata, which isn’t at all clear from the ‘featured at Summer Game Fest, is that you have to control both of its main characters simultaneously. Astronaut Hugh and Diana, a little orphan android, team up to escape a moon base besi𒁏eged by a hostile AI and its army of murderbots. Hugh handles the shooting, naturally, while Diana uses her technomancy to hack into the robots and disable their defenses.
After a brief cutscene where Hugh awakens to find Diana tending to ꦜhis wounds, you’re thrown directly into combat, where I immediately discovered that bullets don’t do much to the metal exterior of even the weakest killer robot. Luckily, by solving a little maze, Diana can hack enemies and expose their weak points, allowing Hugh to gun them down as any heroic space man is wont to do.
The trick is that the hacking happens in real time. When you hold down the left trigger to aim, a little 5x5 grid💫 overlay appears near the enemy. Using the four face buttons to navigate up, down, left, and right, you’ll need to create a path from point A to point B while steering through some number of circuits to chain them altogether. Successfully completing the puzzle within the time limit will temporarily disable the toasters’ defenses.
Because the game doesn’t pause while you’re puzzle solving, you’ll also need to keep both Hugh and Diana (who rides on Hugh’s back, Kazooie-style) out of🀅 danger. If it sounds hard to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge incoming fire with one half of the controller while simultaneously navigating abstract mazes with the other, well, it is. It forces you to split your attention in a similar way to Gears of War’s active ꦅreload mechanic - but taken to a whole other level of complexity.
Guns Aren’t The Only Thing In Hugh’s Toolbox
If Hugh’s only job was to , having to hack every enemy you encounter could get tedious. Fortunately, there are some tools he can u𒈔se to stay busy and buy Diana some time. For instance, early on I found a weapon that fired stasis fields on the ground that would slow down any enemy that stepped into them. Before I started hacking any robot, I’d make sure to protect myself with a few well-placed stasis fields between myself and the enemies. While my other weapon slots were dedicated to traditional weapons (a pistol and a shotgun) I expect Hugh will find more of these creative tools that 🎃help you control the battlefield while Diana tends to her hacking duties.
When you complete a hack, it feels pretty epic. Time briefly slows as electricity surrounds the robot. They gyrate and burst open, revealing the inner workings of their bodi💟es and giving Hugh a soft target to fire into. Shooting them now does the expected amount of damage and each part you hit lights up just like the machines in Horizon. There’s a lot of satisfying spectacle here to counterbalance the way Pragmata takes something as trivial as shooting baddies, and adds an obstructive layer of puzzle solving on top.
It’s the kind of mechanic that will need to evolve frequently throughout the game to keep it interesting, and I saw only a hint of that in my hands-on demo. There’s a type of consumable item you can find in treasure chests around the station that adds a new type of circuit to 🌌your hacking puzzle. If you choose to draw your path through one of these tiles, the bot will take additional damage when hacked. The chip has a limited number of uses, so you have to make sure you’re prioritizing it when hacking st🐽rong enemies and avoiding it when you’re not.
A Space Age Lone Wolf And Cub
Environmental puzzles juxtapose the combat encounters. You’ll have to hack other things to get around the lunar facility, like doors and elevators, and the path forward is seldom straightforward. But if you have to escape from a space station overtaken by an evil AI, you could do worse than a jetpack and a subservient kid w🐠ith super powers - just make sure you’re emotionally prepared for her to star𓆉t calling you dad.
With the most recent season of The Last of Us just ending, the upcoming release of Death Stranding 2, and all the buzz around l﷽ast week’s tech demo for The Witcher 4, the daddy-daughter trope is hard to avoid right now. I’m not hating on it - it’s an effective way to instantly raise the stakes and make꧃ the protagonist empathetic and relatable, but I haven’t seen enough of Pragmata yet to judge how well it's handled. I’d hope to see the trope somehow subverted here, given what Diana is and Capcom’s penchant for getting a little weird with it.
Capcom basical🦩ly never launches new franchises. If yo♔u don’t count Exoprimal (and who would?) Pragmata is Capcom’s first new IP since 2013’s Gaist Crusher on the 3DS. Here’s hoping Pragmata ends up having a stronger legacy than that. I’ve gone from doubting Pragmata will ever come out to hoping it will actually be good. There’s still so much unknown about this game, but as far as the hacking-and-shooting combo goes, I’m sold.
