The Final Preview

Pragmata has always been a bit of an enigma. The early trailers didn’t offer much in the way of clarity as to what the game actually was, and it wasn’t until people got to play it that they understood the hook of the gameplay. That hook involves hacking robots via a Snake-like puzzle grid and then blasting their faces off. Up until now, I have felt the same way about the world, story, and characters in Pragmata.

However, after spending two hours with the game earlier this month, it is clear that the hook of the story and characters here is just as novel as the gameplay. It makes for a fascinating game with all the charm of many of the cult classics we think of today, but underpinned by a rather engaging mix of Resident Evil-style third-person gameplay and Soulslikes.

Stranded in Space

Pragmata takes place on board a lunar research station on the moon, where you play as Hugh. He is accompanied by Diana, an android girl who has the ability to hack and explore the empty lunar station that has been overrun by a hostile AI. With the goal of returning to Earth, Hugh and Diana seek to restore the lunar research station, take down the android threats, and find a way back to Earth.

Barely anything is known about who Hugh is, why Diana is the only human-like android on the station, and why the station itself is devoid of other workers and humans. And, in this demo, I didn’t get many answers, but I did get to see how the fact that Hugh is a human and Diana is an android makes for some fascinating character conversations and development.

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Hugh and Diana form the backbone of the story, with Diana clearly playing a more pivotal role.

Diana is nowhere near as annoying as the trailers have made her out to be, and Pragmata’s world design really puts her at the center of the story, rather than Hugh. She is a far more interesting character than him, given that she is the one with the ability to interact and hack the lunar station. Hugh is kind of just the vehicle used to push this story forward, at least from what I have played. However, because Pragmata is filled with items that have been taken or recreated from Earth, and Diana, being an android, has no concept of most of these.

I got to play through an entire section of the lunar station, which consists of a recreated New York (which was seen in the original trailer for the game). Diana is constantly bemused and confused by how humans do things, and it makes for a dynamic between Hugh and Diana that reminds me a lot of Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us Part 1, where Joel was constantly offering these small doses of insight to Ellie about what the world was like before the Cordyceps infection spread.

One moment that really stood out was when you could interact with a table to start a conversation, and Diana noted that she “can’t believe humans need to eat at least three times a day, it seems quite inefficient”. But Hugh offered insight into how eating is a communal ritual for humans. It’s not just a process or a thing you need to gain energy, it’s a special time for families and friends to talk, decompress after a day, or share stories about their lives with each other.

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The dynamic between Diana and Hugh really grabbed me in my time playing.

It was the moment where everything about the set-up and characters of Pragama clicked into place, and I said to myself, “Oh, this is brilliant and heartwarming”. It’s the same concept of the core relationship that runs through The Last of Us Part 1 with Joel and Ellie, but instead of Hugh explaining what humans used to do 20 or 30 years ago, he is explaining to someone with no concept of humanity what it means to be human. The things that define the species, the memories we create with each other, the incredible cities that we have built, and the objects and items we have crafted to benefit our lives or make our lives easier.

It’s a fascinating twist on the father-daughter relationship that we have seen a lot of in games, and it’s what I walked away most impressed with from my hands-on session. The options for sweet moments between Hugh and Diana feel boundless, and I really hope there are constant moments in the game that lean on this to give Pragmata its unique narrative edge.

More Going on Than You Might Imagine

What I also saw in my two hours with the game was some of my more prominent worries dispelled after playing the demo last year at Gamescom. There is far more environment and enemy variety than we have seen so far. From small drones that shoot at you or launch rockets, to these large android balls that charge up and kamikaze roll into you, to the giant baby androids we saw in the most recent trailer.

On top of that, the game’s sterile, beige walls of the lunar station were replaced by the large recreation of New York that enveloped the entire section of the lunar station. Seeing Times Square in this manufactured form that resembles the look of the place but misses the soul of the city was a welcome change from the offices and halls in the previous demo, and I get the sense that each section of the city will look and feel different thanks to its visuals and the minimal, yet impactful synth-based soundtrack. New York was accented by the feeling that it was half-finished. Taxis are melting into the ground, as the Lunarfillament (a key resource in the game), which has been used to recreate the city, seemingly decomposes due to being left abandoned. The main streets feel dense, while the back alleys feel unfinished and empty visually, presumably as work on recreating the city halted or never finished.

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New York is impressive and a welcome change from the hallways of the lunar station.

Everything felt crafted with strong intent and the overall vibe was Remedy-esque. It reminds me a lot of what we have seen from Control Resonant, where the city sort of folds in on itself, but with a sci-fi, futuristic sheet of paint instead of a supernatural, surreal throughline.

The enemy attacks and their abilities also vary wildly and I felt challenged, especially in larger fights with multiple enemy types, as you try to manage hacks between enemies and use hacking modules within the Snake-like grid to disable enemies or open up windows of opportunity.

Like the more recent Resident Evil games, combat felt incredibly scrappy, and the weapons are immensely satisfying to use. They feel chunky, and the noises they make resonate through your headphones. They were constantly using these hacking modules and different weapons to make the most of their abilities, whether it was a grenade launcher that shoots a containment shield that freezes enemies in place, or slowly guiding enemies into a line so I could take them all out with a piercing rifle.

It’s pretty clear that the Resident Evil model of slow enemies, low resources, and using what you have to your advantage was the foundation here, but the hacking opens up new possibilities. One key example was the ability to use Diana to activate various hazards and traps in the environment. She can also hack rockets and other projectiles and send them back to the androids that fired them, which felt especially cool in the moment.

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Pragmata’s gameplay is even stronger as the game goes on with more enemy variety and more complex hacking grids.

The gunplay and gameplay only impressed me more here, and beyond the combat, there are a lot of secrets, hidden puzzles, and areas that you can access for secrets that provide more lore on the world or even items that humans use on Earth for Diana to play around with and discover. In that way, it feels very Metroidvania-ish, even if you aren’t unlocking big new abilities that allow you to revisit areas constantly. There are even crystal-lizard-like enemies from Dark Souls here in the form of drones that fly around and drop currency, disappearing if you don’t destroy them fast enough.

Soulslike Strokes

The final aspect of Pragmata I saw here that hasn’t really been discussed at all is the immense amount of buildcrafting and options you have. At the center of the lunar station there is a base that you can use to upgrade your gear and enhance your abilities. These include things like a stats screen for Hugh’s damage, health, and Diana’s healing power, as well as a crafting bench for new weapons, hacking modules, passive abilities, and upgrades.

This can then be equipped on a loadout screen before you fast travel back to a region of the ship. It all feels heavily inspired by the Soulslike genre because of the sheer amount of options you have. On top of the above, you can upgrade your health recharges, add additional hacking modules to the grid as you play, and enhance various aspects of Hugh and Diana’s abilities.

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Pragmata has a lot of options for you to tune combat, beyond what I initially expected.

This is mostly done through dozens and dozens of passive abilities that you can find as you play and then equip. However, you can only have a few of these on at a time, giving you a lot of choice in how you spec both Hugh and Diana, depending on how you play. Do you want to focus on speeding up hacking or making it easier? Do you want to boost your evasive capabilities, or are you an all-out damage machine and want every weapon to do the maximum damage possible?

Those are the broad strokes, but there are fine details to each of these buffs, and I imagine you can create a lot of wild combinations of Hacking Modules, passive buffs, and weapons that allow you to really enhance what matters to you most as you play. I certainly didn’t expect this side of the game, but it’s nice to see what you can do with Resident Evil’s gameplay foundation with some proper progression and upgrades.

I definitely think there are a lot of options for replayability and flexibility for how you approach Pragmata based on the small glimpse I got in the menus.

What stood out most in this demo was how all the parts of the game felt like they came together for the first time. Either in trailers or in the previous demo, something always felt missing. But, between the gameplay, opportunities for buildcrafting, and the depth in customization, as well as the unique narrative and character spin granted by the game’s premise, Pragmata is a rather unique concoction that you can’t really compare to anything else.

While it borrows aspects from many other genres and titles in Capcom’s library, it feels like one of Capcom’s many experimental titles from across the years that will go on to be remembered fondly because of how it is trying so many new things at the same time. If the full game delivers this, then Pragmata will be another excellent title from Capcom in what has been a bumper decade for the publisher.