Hands-On: Pragmata Is The Stylish Sci-Fi Action I've Been Craving

Forbes

8 hours ago

If you were surprised to see a few months ago that PRAGMATA still exists and wasn't canceled, you wouldn't be the only one. After originally being unveiled several years ago, it mostly went silent until springing back to life over the summer. Well, Capcom must have some confidence in the project again because it was included in a lineup of pre-release demos I got to check out over at their office in San Francisco a few days ago.
Thankfully, I can confirm that not only is PRAGMATA a real game that feels close to being finished, but it's also incredibly fun. What I love about Capcom games is that they always deliver in terms of production values with wonderfully detailed and weirdly realized worlds that you won't find anywhere else and PRAGMATA seems to be checking both of those boxes.
PRAGMATA—Hands-On Preview
I really wasn't sure what to expect with PRAGMATA since the footage I'd seen up until this point didn't shed much light on the world, setting, or characters beyond the fact that you play as a guy in a space suit with guns while a small child clings to your back. As it turns out, that's pretty much it—well, kind of.
In PRAGMATA you play as Hugh Williams, an everyman astronaut guy sent to a lunar facility to investigate its loss of contact with Earth. A lunar quake hits, Hugh gets separated from his team, and that seems to be right around the point where my demo picks up from with Diana awakening to rescue Hugh from a creepy robot guy.
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Diana isn't a human child though, she's an android technically classified as D-I-03367, but can be referred to as Diana instead. I appreciate that PRAGMATA leans into the strong male protagonist with a weaker, small companion trope that's become exceedingly common these days, but does so with a bit of subversion as well. Instead of the companion being a little robot buddy or a child, it's just both. This isn't Ellie in The Last of Us or BD-1 in Star Wars Jedi, it's Diana, and I think she's pretty fantastic.
Right off the bat, she proves her utility in her ability to hack the robots you're facing, unlock pressure locks, and generally interact with most things that Hugh can't. They complement each other perfectly and it creates a really wholesome dynamic that's fun to see evolve. In my brief 20 minutes with the game, I found Diana endearing in her earnestness and chipper attitude. She lends a lot of levity to an otherwise bleak and sterile sci-fi setting.
PRAGMATA puts a pistol in your hand very quickly, but it shoots incredibly slowly and has a small magazine size that slowly recharges. Just as you start to feel like your firepower isn't enough for the mast basic enemy, Diana chimes in that she can help by hacking.
The little hacking mini game looked very confusing at first glance (pictured below) but actually ended up being incredibly intuitive and fun. Essentially, when you aim at an enemy, Diana will lock on and a hacking window will appear. While aiming at the enemy, you'll use the face buttons (square, triangle, circle, and X) to move around the grid. You'll have to pass your cursor across the arrows in the correct direction and land on the green node to initiate the hack which deals damage on its own, but more importantly, lowers their defenses and allows your weapons to do real damage.
Mapping this mechanic to the face buttons and not slowing the action down at all is a great design choice. The result is that combat feels frantic and stressful, but in a fun way. You can still move and dodge while hacking, so it doesn't hinder you entirely, you'll just have to keep an eye on the enemy while you perform the hacking sequence. It can get chaotic when there's a lot going on.
In addition to the Grip Gun pistol, I also found a Shockwave Gun, which was like a ridiculously powerful shotgun, and the Stasis Net, a crowd control weapon that freezes enemies in place. Both of these secondary weapons have limited ammo and once you expend everything, the gun disappears from your inventory until you find another to pick up.
At first, I was unsure on this 'vanishing gun' system, but I actually think it works well. It keeps you moving and forces you to experiment with weapons as you come across them without just sticking to the same handful you gravitate towards at the start. Similar to the weapon degradation in Breath of the Wild, I think this is a good idea here as well.
The demo essentially consisted of three core elements: combat against basic enemies, some light puzzle solving and exploration, and then a big boss fight. The exploration and puzzle solving bits were a lot more rewarding than I anticipated though, thanks once again to the clever hacking mechanic.
Instead of navigating a grid maze like you do in combat, hacking things like terminals and locks was a little more straight forward with rotating barriers and number sequences. The layer of interactivity is just enough to break up the core gameplay loop and keep scratching that part of your brain that likes figuring things out. The visual feedback, sound design, and adorable quips from Diana make everything really sing too. This is a stylish brand of sci-fi action quirkiness I've been missing for a very long time.
Once I eventually made my way to the boss fight, all the pieces come together in a harmony of chaos. Despite its hulking size, this enemy was dashing around at breakneck speed, dropping missile strikes all around, and blasting lasers in an attempt to eviscerate me. I had to constantly stay on the move, while hacking at the same time, in an attempt to rotate around behind the enemy and blast away at the fuel tank weak spot on its back.
Once the deed was done and it collapsed, the demo quickly ended. This was one of those demos I went in knowing very little and came away absolutely salivating for more. PRAGMATA is a game that feels wholly unique and charming in a very special kind of way and I'm eager to continue digging into what it has to offer.
We still don't have a definitive release date for PRAGMATA, but I can guarantee I'll be there on day one without a doubt. I need more of this in my life expeditiously.
PRAGMATA is slated for release sometime in 2026 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. If you want to see my hands-on impressions from the other Capcom games from this preview event, check out my author page here.