After spending over 200 hours in Crimson Desert it feels almost bizarre to play through an entire AAA game in under 15 hours, but Capcom’s Pragmata is 90% killer with a little filler for the completionists out there.
You play as Hugh, part of a team of astronauts sent to investigate a distress call on a lunar base. When it all goes wrong due to a sudden moon-quake, Hugh finds himself trapped on a deteriorating space station with Diana, the titular Pragmata, a sophisticated AI android who, for reasons that will become clear, resembles a six-year-old girl.
Hugh soon learns that the base is ground zero for a disaster involving Lunum, a rare miracle-rock that exists deep below the moon’s surface. It was used in the base to create “Lunafilament”, a material that can be used to 3D print almost anything you can imagine, including an army of killer machines that Hugh and Diana soon run afoul of. It’s hard to talk too much about the story without going into spoilers, but suffice to say out heroes find themselves up against I.D.U.S, the base’s rogue AI, who has allowed the lunafilament to run rampant.
Luckily, Diana is state-of-the-art, and equipped with the ability to remotely hack electronics, including the hostile bots. How this plays out in the game is supremely satisfying. Holding the left trigger when about is close enough (a range you can extend with mods to Hugh’s suit), a grid will appear that lets you use the face buttons to hit a series of nodes to “open” the target’s outer shell, allowing you to do damage.
There’s a pretty varied gallery of enemies, from flying, laser-shooting drones to giant, building-sized scorpion bots, and they can all be brought down in a similar way. Of course, Pragmata forces you to mix your tactics by throwing multiple enemy types at you at once, including huge overgrown Executor bots, sentient turrets, and samurai-like combat machines.
Using a combination of Diana’s special hacks Hugh’s ever-growing arsenal, you can activate protocols that feel like spells, freezing or confusing enemies, and stacking effects to hit multiple targets at once. Combat is fast, frantic, sometimes panicky as you hammer button inputs while dodging lasers, melee attacks, and enemy fire. Hugh’s suit is equipped with upgradeable thrusters to dodge incoming attacks, which can be tweaked to add a slowdown effect.
Although the campaign is linear, each area you go to is packed full of secrets from new mods and training programs to weapons, upgrades, and currency or material for improving Hugh and Diana’s abilities. There’s a Metroidvania element to it, too, as you can hop back to previous areas as you unlock new functions for both characters, enabling you to pick the lunar base clean for useful kit.
In between forays you’ll return to the Shelter, a safe haven powered by Cabin Technology, which has multiple levels unlocked with licenses you usually get from defeating the huge boss bots. Cabin uses Lunafilament to create “memories” from items you find in the world, which have Diana in awe and wonder as she regards things like sandcastles, campfires, and playgrounds for the first time. You can also unlock a VR training module to test your skills and unlock things like additional Cabin Coins, that let Hugh purchase outfits, mods, and other goodies from the Shelter’s resident AI.
Never are you tested more than in Red Rooms, restricted areas that require special keys to unlock. These combat challenges throw waves of enemies at you with various modifiers and a handful of weapons and hacks, both of which are finite and must be found or printed in the Shelter before you leave each time. Red areas are super tough, but highly rewarding, and give you another reason to explore as much of the base as you can at any given time.
And you will want to explore, if only to listen to the growing friendship between Hugh and Diana. She’s fairly new to the world, having been recently created and left alone to learn everything outside of her core protocols for herself. As a result she’s curious about everything, and approaches the world with childlike innocence, glee, and genuine wonder. Where Capcom could have countered this by making Hugh surly and troubled, they instead present a protagonist who’s just an actual nice guy. He talks about being adopted, how his parents supported him to travel the world, and how his lost team were like brothers to him. It’s an interesting dynamic that isn’t coloured by the usual buddy-story conceits like chalk-and-cheese characters or past trauma. It’s actually refreshing to just have nice characters who you root for because they deserve to live and make it back to Earth.
Pragmata does storytelling as well as it does combat and exploration, and the whole package comes across as incredibly likeable and eminently playable. Hugh’s movement can feel a bit clunky and his jump and glide isn’t always as precise or responsive as it should be, and there are bosses and areas in the back third of that game that will really test your ability to juggle a monumental amount of balls in stressful situations. Bots tend to come in waves but you’re never sure what will follow what, and your restricted ammo and limited hacks run out quickly if you can’t keep a clear head. In true Capcom style, finishing the game unlocks new modes and challenges, but I’m not going into that here. You’ll need to find out for yourself.
While a lot of Pragmata is set inside white-panelled labs and corridors, there are some stunning vistas when the story guides Hugh and Diana to them, and the voice work and animation is pretty solid throughout. There isn’t a huge cast of characters, but the story is tight and compelling and, while it doesn’t offer many surprises, it’s not as clear cut as it first appears.
Capcom is, if nothing else, consistent with quality. Even when some of the new IPs don’t set the world on fire like Exoprimal or Kunitsu-Gami, it’s not down to the quality of the games themselves, and these tend to be Capcom’s more experimental projects. It’s hard to say for certain where Pragmata will fall, but it feels new and fresh while also being quintessentially Capcom-esque in its design and execution. Despite some harsh difficulty spikes and a little clunkiness from the protagonist, Pragmata is one of Capcom’s most interesting and enjoyable adventures to date.
