With artificial intelligence changing how people work and live, it’s no surprise that Capcom’s new sci-fi game Pragmata harnesses that zeitgeist to create a new take on the third-person shooter. The game successfully remixes Resident Evil-style action with fluid gameplay and a somewhat challenging campaign. For anyone who’s been too spooked to try a Resident Evil game, this is a great alternative. For those who just wanted more of the recent Resident Evil Requiem, this is a great chaser.
Much of modern sci-fi gaming has focused on endlessly expansive games, such as Starfield and No Man’s Sky. Pragma is a smaller experience that tightly packs in a lot of action and reasonably fun mechanics. It’s a breath of fresh air for anyone who wants a cool weekend jaunt shooting robots, hanging out with your adopted AI daughter and getting to the bottom of a space mystery.
Pragmata has the look and feel of a Resident Evil game — it’s built on the Resident Evil Requiem engine — but carves out enough of its own experience with a unique mid-combat mechanic. While the main character, Hugh, is shooting guns at robot enemies, his adopted AI android daughter figure, Diana, can hack the enemy to make them vulnerable or even disabled. It added another ball to juggle in tense firefights that occasionally overwhelmed me, but is a generally satisfying complication to tried-and-true third-person shooter combat.
In gameplay mechanics and character relationship, Diana is the core of Pragmata’s appeal. Your joy as a player will hinge on how much you like having 3 feet of weaponized cute blonde girl tagging along and helping you fight. I personally found her endearing, especially in the quiet between-mission moments where I could give her a basketball court or swingset I found out in the field to liven up our antiseptic space-station shelter. In return, she’d give me a crayon drawing that should end up on a space fridge. But I could also see her kewpie voice getting annoying. You’re either playing Pragmata with her or despite her.
I’ve only gotten about halfway through the game, so I don’t have final thoughts on how satisfying the relationship ends up, but the moment-to-moment gameplay with her is… fine. In fights, she’s indispensable, requiring you to open up enemies through a hacking mini-game consisting of navigating a small maze while enemies bear down on you. While playing on PS5, I pushed the face buttons on the right side of the controller to hack, while using the left joystick to move and the shoulder buttons to shoot and dash around. It’s a little inelegant, but it ratchets up the danger of slow-moving robot enemies (some of which feel like reskinned zombies).
In the first few hours, I clocked Pragmata as a tamer Space Resident Evil with a signature man-and-his-daughter combat quirk (we could have had this in Requiem if Leon let Grace ride piggyback and start blasting). But Capcom’s new game jettisons more than horror in adapting its third-person shooting gameplay format to a science fiction setting, dropping complex lore and mechanics for a lean experience. Pragmata is a stronger experience for all its restraint — a short, potent action title with just enough heart to keep the player engaged.
With Pragmata, less is more
Pragmata wastes little time in getting players to the action. The game opens with a short cutscene introducing main character Hugh, alongside three colleagues coming to a suspiciously quiet moon base owned by Delphi, an Apple-meets-SpaceX wonder megacorp. Minutes later, a moonquake splits up the team and drops Hugh in the lap of an android who’s designed, for reasons that aren’t yet clear to me, to look and speak like a 5-year-old white girl. Hugh quickly names her Diana.
It’s clear Capcom wanted players to bond with and look after a young kid, the latest in a line of unlikely dads learning to care for their pseudo-daughters (The Last of Us, The Witcher 3, BioShock Infinite, Telltale’s The Walking Dead). The subversion, aside from Diana’s potential greater purpose as a Pragmata-type android, is that she’s a robust robot who’s not in any apparent danger, even in firefights. Rather than requiring the player to constantly look after her — similar to other daughter figures who need escorting, like Ashley in Resident Evil 4 — the game shaves down the protagonist’s role to just guiding Diana to personhood, rather than preserving her fragile existence.
This is one of many ways Pragmata (the game) is simpler than it could’ve been, and it’s arguably a better experience for it. Players have a primary gun that reloads itself along with a limited-ammo special weapon. They also have slots for two other types of special-use firearms or equipment that affect the battlefield, from stasis nets to decoys that distract enemies. No vast armories — just choices for which options you want to take into a fight.
There’s more customization depth for players who want to dive deeper into the game’s unlockables, which include a litany of equippable mods and bonuses to Diana’s hacking capabilities, many of which are tucked away in the corners of the various moon base sections. There are optional simulation challenge levels players can tackle to power up Hugh or unlock lore files and costumes.
Pragmata: Not hard, not easy, just satisfying
Pragmata’s streamlined systems leaves players free to focus on linearly progressing through the game, which is broken up into room after room of simple, satisfying challenges. Most are different combinations of enemies of escalating complexity, each of which require hacking to make vulnerable for Hugh’s firearms. Others involve unlocking doors by scanning somewhat hidden lock nodes, requiring light platforming and nosing up, down and around corners of atrial arenas. I’m neither frustrated nor bored, comfortably humming through the game.
Capping off each of the aforementioned sections are boss battles — satisfyingly unique mega-bots firing rockets and lasers as they stomp and charge around maps, pushing players to juggle hacking while dashing out of the way. They’re enjoyable endurance tests that are surprisingly well-tuned. Once, after some sloppy play, the boss of the third area whittled me down to a sliver of health, and I spent the next 5 minutes locking in, barely eking out a win. Crucially, I have only had to attempt each boss fight once; somehow, Capcom avoided the trend of making bosses challenging enough, yet not so Soulsborne-level tough that each one takes multiple attempts to beat.
Tough game sickos might be turned off (harder difficulties are available after beating the game), but I relished in the precise level of challenge bosses and enemies have posed throughout Pragmata: I come, I fight, I move forward. This is a smooth experience, with enemies a satisfying speedbump amid the story and developing relationship between Hugh and Diana. I’m running, jumping, hacking and shooting, a necessary momentum to keep me from asking undermining questions like «why didn’t they make the androids adults?» and «why is the ultra-smart android drawing pictures for Hugh at all, let alone ones that look like they’re made by 5-year-old kids in crayon?»
Ultimately, I don’t care too much, because being handed a crayon-drawn picture from a character who is functionally the protagonist’s adopted daughter is humanely affecting. And for these handful of oddly-conceived moments, Pragmata has many more of smooth action between Hugh and Diana working as a fun team.
And every once in awhile, the game pauses for a minute or two to let the man from Earth tell the moon-born robot what life is like on a blue planet. It may not make sense that an android would care, but the game is so streamlined that its offenses are few, and I’ll let it carry me along its illogical, earnest train for a bit longer. There’s probably a rad boss battle ahead anyway.
