GoKawiilWith artificial intelligence changing how people work and live, it's no surprise that Capcom's new sci-fi game Pragmata harnesses that zeitgeist to create a new take on the third-person shooter. The game successfully remixes Resident Evil-style action with fluid gameplay and a somewhat challenging campaign. For anyone who's been too spooked to try a Resident Evil game, this is a great alternative. For those who just wanted more of the recent Resident Evil Requiem, this is a great chaser.
Much of modern sci-fi gaming has focused on endlessly expansive games, such as Starfield and No Man's Sky. Pragma is a smaller experience that tightly packs in a lot of action and reasonably fun mechanics. It's a breath of fresh air for anyone who wants a cool weekend jaunt shooting robots, hanging out with your adopted AI daughter and getting to the bottom of a space mystery.
Pragmata has the look and feel of a Resident Evil game -- it's built on the Resident Evil Requiem engine -- but carves out enough of its own experience with a unique mid-combat mechanic. While the main character, Hugh, is shooting guns at robot enemies, his adopted AI android daughter figure, Diana, can hack the enemy to make them vulnerable or even disabled. It added another ball to juggle in tense firefights that occasionally overwhelmed me, but is a generally satisfying complication to tried-and-true third-person shooter combat.
In gameplay mechanics and character relationship, Diana is the core of Pragmata's appeal. Your joy as a player will hinge on how much you like having 3 feet of weaponized cute blonde girl tagging along and helping you fight. I personally found her endearing, especially in the quiet between-mission moments where I could give her a basketball court or swingset I found out in the field to liven up our antiseptic space-station shelter. In return, she'd give me a crayon drawing that should end up on a space fridge. But I could also see her kewpie voice getting annoying. You're either playing Pragmata with her or despite her.
I've only gotten about halfway through the game, so I don't have final thoughts on how satisfying the relationship ends up, but the moment-to-moment gameplay with her is... fine. In fights, she's indispensable, requiring you to open up enemies through a hacking mini-game consisting of navigating a small maze while enemies bear down on you. While playing on PS5, I pushed the face buttons on the right side of the controller to hack, while using the left joystick to move and the shoulder buttons to shoot and dash around. It's a little inelegant, but it ratchets up the danger of slow-moving robot enemies (some of which feel like reskinned zombies).
In the first few hours, I clocked Pragmata as a tamer Space Resident Evil with a signature man-and-his-daughter combat quirk (we could have had this in Requiem if Leon let Grace ride piggyback and start blasting). But Capcom's new game jettisons more than horror in adapting its third-person shooting gameplay format to a science fiction setting, dropping complex lore and mechanics for a lean experience. Pragmata is a stronger experience for all its restraint -- a short, potent action title with just enough heart to keep the player engaged.
Screenshot by David Lumb/CNET
With Pragmata, less is more
Pragmata wastes little time in getting players to the action. The game opens with a short cutscene introducing main character Hugh, alongside three colleagues coming to a suspiciously quiet moon base owned by Delphi, an Apple-meets-SpaceX wonder megacorp. Minutes later, a moonquake splits up the team and drops Hugh in the lap of an android who's designed, for reasons that aren't yet clear to me, to look and speak like a 5-year-old white girl. Hugh quickly names her Diana.
It's clear Capcom wanted players to bond with and look after a young kid, the latest in a line of unlikely dads learning to care for their pseudo-daughters (The Last of Us, The Witcher 3, BioShock Infinite, Telltale's The Walking Dead). The subversion, aside from Diana's potential greater purpose as a Pragmata-type android, is that she's a robust robot who's not in any apparent danger, even in firefights. Rather than requiring the player to constantly look after her -- similar to other daughter figures who need escorting, like Ashley in Resident Evil 4 -- the game shaves down the protagonist's role to just guiding Diana to personhood, rather than preserving her fragile existence.
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