In Capcom’s sci-fi third-person shooter Pragmata, you are a gruff and gun-toting astronaut called Hugh Williams who is exploring an AI-operated moon base with the help of a juvenile android, Diana. She rides on your back like a sinister blue-eyed goblin, her enormous mop of blonde hair flapping in the wind as Hugh jets around on his suit thrusters.
The notes of God Of Warlike deuteragonism here betray Pragmata’s dragged-out development – it was announced in 2020, when Dad & Sprog action games were all the rage, but was delayed “indefinitely” in 2023. Still, the game I played at this year’s Summer Game Fest didn’t seem greatly the worse for its long spell in cryostasis. It’s a slick thinking girl’s shooter and a gratifyingly bright and clicky piece of lunar set dressing, with shattering robot enemies that put me wistfully in mind of Binary Domain.
In Greek myth, Diana was the goddess of both the Moon and the hunt. Pragmata’s Diana isn’t much shop with a bow, but she does have a knack for electronic warfare. Aim at an enemy and hold a trigger to start a hacking minigame, in which you move a cursor around a grid of glyphs with the face buttons.
Hacking is essential for survival: the station’s robots sport forcefields that must be disabled before Hugh can blast them, and there are also door locks and elevator controls that need to be operated from afar. So it’s just as well that the hacking is enjoyable, fitting elegantly around the basic twin-stick shoulder-shooter controls – half jigsaw, half Gears Of War power reload. As you explore, you’ll add special glyphs to the hacking grid that confer buffs and debuffs, making it a more flexible tactical tool.
Quite why the robots are out to get you remains to be seen, but the moon base AI administrator has clearly gone a bit rampant. In the demo, I came across half-generated roomfuls of old-timey Earth furniture and crackling, cuboid stalagmites created by glitchy 3D printing. Hugh and Diana’s broad objective is to get out of there, but there is a mystery to solve along the way and Diana is doubtless a central plank. Going by the story trailers, I am expecting a routine piece of makes-you-thinkery about bots learning to be human – a fable from the era of Ghost In The Shell, when the idea of artificial intelligence was an exotic fantasy rather than a passive-aggressive component of every Windows UI.
I’m not expecting grand philosophical rhetoric, or strenuous scenes of surrogate parental bonding. Pragmata seems pretty, well, pragmatic about the business of aiding or repelling sentient machines, firmly magbooted to the rhythms of door puzzles and small-scale shootouts.
During the demo, I had to hack six control panels to open a big airlock, a quest that took me around a small, dense expanse of motorised platforms and sealed-room firefights. Everything flowed together straightforwardly. I picked up an electro shotgun just in time for the game to introduce a larger, thuggier breed of bot, and harvested a few holo diaries left by absent, possibly dead human residents. I also found a stungun with an AOE effect, useful for crowd control, and faced off briefly with a giant spider droid before the demo ended.
According to Capcom, Pragmata began life as the work of a younger team. It’s pure speculation, but I sense that it was once a far weirder game that had its stranger fittings sanded off by the bosses. There’s a certain etherised quality to it, imposed above all by the station layout, which squares away the challenges a little too sleepily. As such, I don’t think it’ll rival, say, Prey 2017 as spacebase fables go, but it ticks certain boxes: an absorbing environment; posh gunnery with flavourful h@cker fixins; Capcom’s usual charismatic third-person animation. It’s down to release in 2026.
