Capcom has really become one of the developers that are simply raising the bar on what a good release would look like in the past several years. My admiration for their work not only stems from the guaranteed fanbases they’ll get from putting out titles like Resident Evil, Street Fighter, or Monster Hunter, but also from their willingness to take risks on new IPs. The fascinating show of culture and history you get out of Kunitsugami, the hero shooter that we thought would be the return of another dinosaur-related game, Exoprimal, and now the game that faced many struggles after its initial reveal, Pragmata. Each of these is facing a different level of success, and today I’d like to share with you why I think Pragmata just made it past 2 million copies sold as of this writing.
This was a game I was able to try out at last year’s Tokyo Game Show. And my impressions from the demo left me pretty satisfied and interested in what it had. It was a matter of how well they would keep things interesting for the entire playthrough of the full game, and now that I’ve finally rolled credits on it. I think this game is indeed what it says it is on Twitter. It is not a Megaman game.
You are, however, joined by a blue robot. Who happens to look like a young kid. Who helps you fight other robots that have gone rogue? The blue robot also gets stronger as you progress through the game after beating respective level bosses. You find powerups, upgrades and mods by thoroughly exploring the areas you visit. Which doesn’t at all sound like Megaman, right? RIGHT?
Anyway, let’s settle down, and put down the pieces of what makes this game a recommend on my books.
Production (5 / 5)
This title is another product of Capcom’s RE engine, which does a spectacular job of making the 3D printed world of Pragmata look flashy and interesting. The laboratory theme fits with making the areas look like the inside of a chip factory, being clean, simple, and shiny. Pairing it with the rather minimalist interface the game provides, it does remind me of Kojima’s Death Stranding a bit, especially with how it feels to go around the Shelter area. With the concept of being able to replicate anything to a convincing degree, the settings we are taken to can go in any direction. From the sterilized production rooms of the Shelter, to the confusing streets of New York, to even an overgrown jungle. The change in setting helps you feel like you’ve progressed through the game, as it also shows you new obstacles and objectives that fall in tune with your new playground.
I was playing this on the PlayStation 5, but I’ve seen PC setups that take it to the next level with their lighting effects and reflections, which really shine during the city section of the game. And based on reports on it by other people on the internet, the PC performance is stellar as well, so I think this game will do well on any platform you decide to pick it up on (of course, PC will have certain minimum requirements, so please look that up).
The characters are actually not a lot to speak about, except for Diana, our little Pragmata assistant. Who not only has a wonderfully expressive face, but is matched with all of the game’s hair physics, as well. The robot girl is adorable by all accounts. Where, honestly, I think it’s laid on a little thick at times, but not to the point where I’m actually bothered by it.
Other characters, Hugh Williams, and every other robot in the game are a bit more mechanical. Ironically, Hugh’s default space suit and posture make me think of him as something like a mecha Godzilla more than a human. Which I think is cool in its own right, the basic humanoid enemies make me think they belong in a Silent Hill game because of how creepy they look. So, in other words, they’re doing an excellent job! Because that makes me want to shoot them down as quickly as possible.
If there was anything I was a little more upset with about what I see in the game, it’s really more about what I can’t see. The difficulty of playing the game simply spikes up when you have enemies out of your field of view. Your only other way of knowing if something is coming is Diana’s voice telling you to dodge. And I can understand not wanting to crowd too much information on the screen, considering you have a hack window occupying a large part of screen real estate already. But I wish I could zoom out a little better in the game to give me a bit more spatial awareness of what’s around me.
The sound dimension does a pretty satisfying job as well. I may have mentioned this before, but I’m a big fan of a game having some level of scoring. Or having music that’s timed to specific moments during your playthrough. Having them play in sync with certain moments to enhance the intended experience. They pulled it off great here, especially since there’s theming to go along with it. I really like it when there’s basically this single melody that’s used consistently through several BGMs throughout the game. And well, Pragmata does it with such simplicity that it feels sincere and earnest. You know, like how it’s like when you see a child trying to communicate or connect with you. It’s all these pieces getting put together to make this cohesive experience. It’s showing, and telling, and demonstrating it in front of you for you to just naturally let things fall into place in your head. It’s wonderful work.
The voicework will mainly focus on our two protagonists. Diana and Hugh’s dialogue is the kind of stuff that just fills me with hope. It’s not cynical; there’s no need to constantly quip with each other, there’s just enough humor to keep things light. Which, in other aspects seems weird, but I’m not really going to dwell on that. The only issue I have with the voice is that the acting seems to lay it on a little thick sometimes, specifically for Diana. But I do know and have met kids that sound exactly like this. So maybe it’s just a little thick for my taste. Also on that note, this would be one of the rare occasions that a weeb (or basically an old anime fan) such as myself actually prefers the English voices as opposed to the Japanese ones. The expressions, the mouth movement, and the setting just seem to match better with English-speaking lines as opposed to Japanese ones, despite this being a Japanese-developed game. Which I think is really more of a compliment to the actors and directors, more than anything.
Mechanics (4.5 / 5)
Pragmata, when you break it down to the buttons you press and what they do, doesn’t seem all that impressive. You have half action game play, which has your typical dodging and shooting weak points. Then you have hacking, which is the simplified puzzle-solving half of the formula. And while the puzzle-solving is rather easy in isolation. It can only be completed if you don’t get hit smoothly in the process.
What makes this interesting is that both your shooting and hacking controls are accessible at any time from your default controller layout. I honestly have a hard time imagining how you’ll manage this with a Mouse and Keyboard layout, but hey, it’s there.
So you have robo-zombies constantly going for your throat, and the only way to deal meaningful damage to them is by opening up their armor through hacking. So, having to manage your positioning, your multi-faceted offense, and tracking what your enemies are doing, this can get a bit hectic at times. Pragmata sometimes feels more like a tactical game than an action game. This occurred to me when I realized how using certain strategies or weapons made harder encounters a cakewalk. My favorite crowd control weapon was the Riot Blaster, which can pretty much stunlock non-tank enemies so long as you have ammo. Very much like how Jet Stingray can’t do anything to you when you spam Frost Tower on him at a corner. (see: Megaman X4).
There’s really not a lot more to illustrate here when it comes to what you do. But like in NieR Automata, what makes this hacking interesting is that these rather simple tasks are applied throughout the world. You move bridges, unlock doors, activate devices, reverse and repel enemy attacks through Diana’s ability to hack. How it’s integrated into the more intense moments of Pragmata is what makes the presence of Hugh and Diana as a duo on an adventure feel real. It’s something that I have to say you’re going to have to play through to truly appreciate. It’s only through actually experiencing the gameplay that you can see how finely tuned the fights are and the system built around it.
While it can feel overwhelming at first, once you get the hang of it, you’re naturally making plans in your head, two to three steps ahead. You know what all 6 of your weapons do, and you know which enemies take priority in taking down. And depending on your build, you should know how to do that. And yes, I said builds, and let’s waste no time in getting to why I just said that.
Content (5 / 5)
Progression in Pragamata is felt through two dimensions. One would be going through the major areas of the moon base. The other is upgrading the abilities of Hugh and Diana by buying them at the Shelter, your hub world of operations. Both of these coincide quite well, as tougher encounters await you deeper into your playthrough, you almost get the needed upgrades just in time as well. Like exploring digs in Megaman Legends, taking your time to investigate the 3D space around you can uncover many pleasant, and sometimes unpleasant surprises. A hidden path that’s easily overlooked can be found, or a hidden upgrade resource or modchip lying in wait behind a fake wall. Missing these isn’t the end of the world either, as checkpoints that you can fast travel to are generously placed around each level, especially right before boss encounters.
So naturally, once you get something significant, such as enough upgrade materials, stamps, or even some new toy for Diana to play with, you’re never too far from a checkpoint to use them. The pacing is pretty perfect in this respect. You’re never too far away from seeing something new within the game. It never feels rushed, either, as you should be familiar enough with everything you’ve learned by the time they restart the loop of giving you something new to deal with. It could be an enemy type, a new weapon, an obstacle, or just an opportunity to take a breather with a new REM. The game was designed to proceed at a pace that you found natural to you, and it wanted you to build an experience that you actively chose to make.
Those choices, I think, are most felt with the build variety you can make with Pragmata. I’ve seen people review this game and have said nothing about how you can generally build in three distinct directions in the game. In general, every weapon answers some problems, but not every problem. A stasis net can freeze enemies for a certain duration, but they recover very quickly. A dummy hologram can fool enemies, but some enemies will still target you instead, and a heat ray can do a lot of damage, but it needs time to ramp up to that damage, as opposed to the shockwave gun that takes forever to reload but unloads a ton of pain in an instant. Hacking nodes supplement these by either targeting multiple enemies at the same time, making them more vulnerable to damage, heat, or even confusing their targeting system to make them hit each other. Mods can help augment the direction you’re going for as well. So to simplify things, I’ll lay out how I played the game.
Around the midpoint of the game, you’re given a new primary, the Pulse Carbine, which was tuned for causing more heat damage than direct damage. Heat damage is basically the stun meter in more generic game terms. Filling it up knocks down the enemy and opens them up for a critical shot attack, which most of the time kills enemies in one hit. So I set my hacking chips to combine stunning, multi-target, and heat build-up effects on the matrix. I use the carbine and supplement my damage with the Missile Launcher and Remote Drones. All of these weapons are described to deal extra heat damage. Finally, I arm mods that spread damage to nearby enemies on Critical Shot, and help me build up heat damage faster. So I basically have an all-heat-focused build because I absolutely hate dealing with tanks that take forever to die. But you can also create builds that are geared towards dealing direct damage, or even center everything on making Diana your primary source of damage. Heck, I was initially just continuously upgrading the Charge Piercer because it was doing so much work for me in the earlier stages.
There’s also a reason to backtrack to other stages, as you will gain the ability to go through other obstacles as Diana gains new abilities. What lies in wait are usually challenges with decent enough prizes at the end of it. You can call it padding, but a lot of it you don’t really need. In fact, upgrading at some point hands you reducing returns. I don’t need to spend 3000 game bits to heal another 50 hp. Nor does an extra 0.03 seconds of hacked time feel significant for an increasing number of upgrade materials required to do so. You go after them because you’re either curious about what’s there or you’re just the type to like completing things. And well, I’m a bit of both. Again, thanks to their checkpoint system, looking for the things I missed during my first run-through was no pain at all. In fact, most of the encounters weren’t really that painful or challenging. Maybe it was at first, but I never had to repeatedly try a boss or a room more than once or twice. Except for one thing, training challenges.
The training challenges that you could access through the shelter are probably the most intense of the gameplay challenges I’ve had with my time on Pragmata. I honestly wish some of the challenges they put up in here were also incorporated into the main campaign. But at the same time, I completely understand why they didn’t. Apart from maybe these timing gimmicks with activating switches or getting from point A to B within a limited time frame. There were no more than a few times that I had to deal with the jamming device that completely blocked out Diana’s ability to hack. They could easily make the game a few orders of difficulty greater simply by adding these anti-fun antennas to regular encounters within the game. They didn’t, and I appreciate that. I never want to see those jammers or rotating lasers again. Just like how I hate spike traps in every Megaman game.
Finally, for the story, well, there’s not a lot of twists in it. But I honestly think that’s for the best. I think Capcom is at its peak when it’s not trying to come up with a convoluted narrative. They deliver the best story experience when they leave some of the blanks up to the player to fill in. Save for maybe some plot holes that, at this point, I’m feeling very charitable to forgive. The characters are genuinely charming and you really grow a fondness for them as you play through the game and you see Hugh slowly get more attached to the android. There are actually variations of what they talk about as you go around key points of certain stages, which was a more than welcome surprise for me when I was backtracking for loot I’ve missed. Capcom chose to focus on the characters and how you’ll watch them journey together, and I think that was the right move, 100%.
Features (5 / 5)
Pragmata feels like a game from the PS3 or Xbox 360 era, with the side and extra content it provides. Because instead of it being on some battle-pass or other form of DLC. It’s already all packaged within the game. You can complete side-challenges like collecting all sorts of Cabin figures by shooting them as you find them across levels, pretty much like in Metal Gear Solid 3’s Kero challenge.
You can also opt to engage with Cabin’s stamp rally, which mainly gives you some mods and other optional skins that you and Diana can fashion however you like, whenever you like. Of course, there’s the standard data log and bestiary viewer, which I appreciate being able to look at as they’re not trying to kill me in this mode.
And with a pleasant surprise, there’s actually more content after finishing the game. Of course, you have the option of playing the New Game+, but you can also play Lost Signal, which gives you a set of challenges and revamped bosses to fight against. All these give you new mods and, in one case, a new weapon to play around with. Which I think are all very appreciated for those who simply want more of this game, given its rather brief stay.
Conclusion
Clocking about 10 hours of play after rolling credits on Pragmata, I feel like it’s a new day. Many games these days are pretty much designed to be your daily hamster wheel, which slowly built within me a cynicism about the game industry. It was only interested in keeping my attention, and more importantly, my wallet on their side of the street. Pragmata gave me a light at the end of the tunnel through all this. Much like Hugh would share stories with Diana, Capcom has demonstrated to me that it still remembers the times that gaming was more direct, more personal, simpler, and most importantly, more experimental.
But what mattered most of all was how this title was focused on helping the player have a good time. Whether it be liking Diana and the bond she forms with Hugh, the unique and tricky balance of puzzle-action gameplay that Pragmata brings, or the perfect pacing that they set the game at. Pragmata never tried to be more than anything it wasn’t, and with that, it felt very easy for me to overlook whatever shortcomings it may have had. It’s a title that grabbed my attention away from my usual rotation of gacha games and Monster Hunter, and honestly, I find that an achievement. The only other thing I can think of right now that could do that would be maybe a new Megaman game.
So? Play it.
Pragmata hits all of the nodes in the right places, scoring a 5/5.
Available on PS5, Xbox Series, PC, and the Nintendo Switch 2.