Pragmata (2026)

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.

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.

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• The kid is also functionally irrelevant and could have been replaced by a hacking tool with a voice.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.