Pragmata (2026)

While I typically will try out and of the big AAA single player games, especially given its Capcom… it’s rarely a favorite of mine, and this is no exception. While I enjoyed the exploration and thought the combat was decent, it just got a bit boring to me and the story didn’t exactly hook me the way it seemed to for others.

Dont have much else to say, it was slightly more fun than I expected but I will definitely never play it again. Slightly generic and tedious, fun for a few hours but by the end I was begging it to end.

5.6/10

So, update time! Playing this one very slowly with bf, about 3 or 4 hours in.

I think the game suffers a little bit of "menu sickeness" and asks a lot of stuff for no reason every 5 minutes (like, why do you have to decide your weapons before leaving the base? and why does it ask you if are you sure after you already chose them? my goodness, stop!), but apart from that it is very fun to play!

Diana is really lovely and I love the chemestry between the characters. The little dialogues added when you go to the base were very clever.

Hmm this one felt a bit all over the place for me. Kind of more like a 3.5 for me.

The gameplay was the highlight for me though, something about hacking along with dashing and shooting just really hit a sweet spot for me, had a lot of fun with combat engagements. However this kinda hits negatively when it comes to just having these rooms full of enemies, which is interesting the first few times but honestly becomes a bit of a chore as it just becomes rooms with more enemies that are also stronger idk. The bosses actually perfect some of these loops for me, though I feel like there should have been more and they should have had more health idk I just wanted the fights to last longer.

The story is probably what attracted most people to the game. Gamers sure do love their bittersweet parent child stories and I get it. But it's just not something that I super cared for tbh. Not gonna speak bad on it I think it's fine just was something that ultimately felt a little cheesy to me and not something that truly grabbed me. I found the relationship between Hugh and Diana not super compelling. Kinda thought they would play more into the fact that Hugh seemed to not care for having kids, but it just kinda felt like he instantly took the parent role and that was that. Idk I just thought they could have done more to really show some kind of character growth and progression from him. I also was not really into the actual lore in the game aside from the science stuff but that's just cause lunafilament sounds dope and reminds me of Portal.

That being said though I really liked the ending of the game narrative wise. The boss fights were really well done and I enjoyed the emotional nature to it.

Anyway definitely a cool game to check out I think most people will love it. A little short for the price but you can do a lot with it if you want. Feels a lot like the old days of shorter narrative driven games. Definitely a nice change from the open world stuff I've been playing lately.

This is a video game ass video game. It knows that it's a video game, it's proud that it's a video game, it has no pretensions of being anything other than a video game. And in my book that's the absolute best kind of video game

Pragmata has exceptionally tight, crunchy combat with a unique mid-combat hacking mechanic to make it stand out and feel fresh, fun movement mechanics and perfect game feel, great level design that makes good use of verticality and secrets, great visuals, impressive optimization, a very simple story that doesn't waste your time with ten minute long non-interactive cutscenes explaining why you're supposed to care about beating a boss before you're allowed to fight said boss.

It has characters that are actually likeable and sincere instead of cynical and snarky.

It perfectly caters to the 30 something male demographic I happen to be a part of with its conceit of shoot robots in space with big guns while also protecting a tiny child.

It has a few collectibles and challenges and completionist things for those who want more after the already very tight, focused 12-ish hour campaign, but not so much that the game is trying to dominate your life for two months. Getting every achievement will run you about 30 hours, and that includes a full second playthrough on a much harder difficulty.

This is everything I want from video games. Gameplay-first design, treating mechanics, player agency, and control feel as THE reason a video game should even exist in the first place. This game was made for me.

May the Year of Capcom continue with Onimusha.

So I just finished my first run through the game, and was left thinking a bit.

The game is definitely fun, and I definitely enjoyed my time through it, but if there's a heart to it, it is definitely the characterization of both Hugh and Diana. When the rest of the game is looked on separately from that, I think there's definitely a sense of something missing.

I enjoyed the hacking, and the gunplay, don't get me wrong. But neither were ever what I'd call enthralling. There was never a sense of sustained excitement , though that could be a me problem and not so much a flaw of the game.

That being said, I think the game could have done with some additional grittiness. The aesthetics are just a little bit too sterile. For such a disaster, there's no blood, no corpses, almost no sign at all that the almost-pristine Cradle was ever inhabited by other humans. Obviously, we know because of the conversation logs, and it can be explained away because of the dead filament devouring organic matter, but the effect is still the same nonetheless.

This sterility is not just in the mapping but also in the enemies and embedded in the story itself. Granted, it make sense that they are all robots, but none of the enemies you ever fight feel particularly interesting from either design or battle point of view. None of them have any character whatsoever to them, and Idus has very little if any character itself either. We also don't really spend much time at all with Eight, so we don't really get to know her.

It baffles me a little. Somehow, they did such a bang-up job with Hughes and Diana and then just... decided to call it a day. It works as it is, barely. And I know a lot of people love the mechanics as they are, and that is enough for them. But I needed more character to enrich the story.

As it is, its just a 3/5 for me.

Lunatic difficulty (the one you unlock after finishing the game once) is not fucking around. I was stuck for hours against the third boss until I finally found a build and strategy that worked. The simple combo of "hacking and shooting" doesn't work anymore, you really have to think about what weapons and hacking mods are you using in every situation.

I dread to think how difficult the final boss will be... or if I'm even able to get to it.

(Edit: Oops, I forgot the mini review lol)

8.5/10

Mini review:

The dad/daughter relationship works wonderfully. Though the plot itself isn't much, the characterization and dynamics between Diana and Hugh made for emotional storytelling. And props to Capcom for trying something new with the hacking mechanics. I understand this is a personal thing, but by the end of it the novelty of it was wearing off, but I still appreciate it as a one-off thing. Very cool. Subtle soundtrack, very gamey with lots of challenges and the like.

Full review:

To elaborate a bit on some of my points:

I have two main criticisms that keep this from a 9/10: the hacking loses its luster, and the plot itself. They do try to keep hacking compelling by introducing different elements as you progress through the game, but I'd be lying if I said that I was always engaged. Sometimes I just wanted to shoot something normally. However, that's on me. I don't blame the game for that because as I reflect, they did enough to keep it interesting for most people.

The plot is pretty basic, meaning the minute to minute storytelling is thin. Even once everything is revealed, it feels rather slight and visited many times before, often better. It's fine but not noteworthy. Now, with that said, this doesn't apply to Diana and Hugh, because there is genuine heart in there that has understandably garnered a lot of the attention. Within 20 minutes I wanted to protect Diana, and I looked forward to every picture she drew, every quip she made, every question she asked. And that saves the plot, honestly, because I just wanted to watch them succeed and interact. But hell, this might not even bother people. It bothers me a bit because when you have a game that focuses so much on the characters, you should also have a compelling, thrilling plot, and this pulls a solid 7/10 in that regard.

So acknowledging that, there are people who won't care because it's a very gamey game. That's fair because there's a lot of game here. Not hour-wise, per se, but with the many challenges and collectables. Honestly, I care less about that stuff nowadays so I only did light exploration and some of the trials, so there were a lot of things I didn't get, but it's never a bad thing for that stuff to be there.

And the gameplay itself is great. Like I said earlier, I dug the hacking more than I thought I would at first. And even though I got a little tired of it for the last maybe hour or two, that doesn't change the rest of it. And there is a decent variety of enemies, guns and strategies, plus it does a good job of introducing other stuff as you go. Everything feels good, looks good.

Pragmata isn't my favourite game of the year or anything, but as of now it's in the Top 5.

I am very glad to say that this game is very fun, the story is pretty engaging, and the father-daughter dynamic is indeed adorable.

I am glad to see that single player games more and more and blowing up and getting the attention and recognition they deserve while other attempted forever games fall spectacularly.

Good on Capcom for giving their teams the resources they need to make quality products like this. A little short overall, but definitely worth it.

Played the demo. My thoughts based on that:

• Gameplay has potential and I can see why people are likely to speedrun this game.
• The kid is kind of annoying, and neither English nor Japanese VO are really a better option. For some reason she keeps grunting and I don’t know who decided that’s a thing children do. Pragmata might be the Super Mario World 2 of Capcom games in terms of annoying sidekicks that spend all their time hanging off your back.
• The kid is also functionally irrelevant and could have been replaced by a hacking tool with a voice. In essence she’s the magic bracelet from Forespoken, a device to enable and explain a main character who narrates their exploration.
• Hugh is a wet blanket in English. Personally I find much more appealing in the Japanese VO. The same goes for the VO for the station systems and AI. The Japanese voice acting really sells the rogue sci-fi setting in a way the English VO doesn’t. It’s not a matter of language, but of the intonation and performative style that better communicates the drone of artificial personalities.
• Platforming is surprisingly alright.
• I think I’d consider giving this a chance once it’s nice and cheap. The demo was fun enough to feel like it’s something I’d play. However, Is also not fun enough to justify paying full price. It’s got some interesting ideas, but it doesn’t feel it always delivers on those ideas in ways that really make the resulting gameplay compelling enough to feel like I need to run out and buy this today.

I wrote a kinda long article trying to tie together all we learn about Delphi, the pragmata androids, lunafilament, dead filament and the themes of the game.

If you notice something wrong or have a different interpretation of what happens, please let me know.

The lore and themes of Pragmata explained (article in spanish, you can use the browser translation tool to read it).

Of course, it has a lot of spoilers. Don't read if you haven't finished the game.

Good review from Yussef Cole:

A New ‘Sad Dad’ Game Fails to Make Its Ancestors Proud

Pragmata employs the dramatic tools of the genre at their basest and most blunt. Hugh is a grizzled soldier type. We learn very little about him, save for vague allusions about loving travel and adventure (watch out, ladies!). We never learn if he wants a family, or if he ever had one. All we get is a little blond child and the assumption that he will drop everything to protect her.

The narrative never rises above this reductive calculation. It pales in comparison to The Last of Us, with its story of a man overcoming the trauma of one lost child with another, ignoring the world in the process. Next to The Walking Dead, whose main character is forced to handle the responsibilities of fatherhood while learning how to survive the zombie apocalypse, Pragmata feels rote and inconsequential.

It does little more than drop this child onto Hugh’s lap (or rather, the convenient footholds on the back of his spacesuit) and expect a narrative about reluctant fatherhood to unfold. What emerges instead is an awkward and inhuman story in which a grown man adopts a robot child — a bizarre relationship at best and a questionable one at worst.

Pragmata invites natural comparisons to “M3gan,” a camp horror film about a robot doll child who starts murdering the neighbors. The doll is developed to provide companionship for a lonely young girl, but she becomes overprotective, her base programming creating an instinct closer to something animalistic and maternally protective.

Every detail about Diana — her frantic blue eyes, the rictus of her grin — seems to set up Pragmata’s story for a similar subversion. But where “M3gan” seeks to undermine its aesthetic, showing us how intelligence and self-awareness inevitably produce agency, Pragmata falls into the sexist and patriarchal assumption that women and children are objects, ready to serve, as long as you love and look out for them.

The player is expected to find something magical in this cute little robot child. But I look at her porcelain cheeks, the elongated lashes on her rolling eyes that blink realistically, and find nothing. Diana and Pragmata are both utterly devoid of life.

Pragmata made me fall in love with its fun combat system based on hacking minigames and the adorable 'father-daughter' relationship between Hugh and Diana. It's true that all its other gameplay and narrative elements are very traditional and unoriginal, but this game makes excellent use of its strengths and will undoubtedly be considered one of the best of the year.

The real shame is that for a while, the game is making very interesting point between the relation between human work and AI work... but then abandon those ideas in pursuit of a more traditional plot.

Anyway, Read my full review in spanish here

I've only had Diana for a 10 hours, but if anything happened to her I would kill everyone in this room and then myself.