It’s hard to believe that not only is Capcom’s mysterious Pragmata still a real thing that’s happening, it’s a real thing that I have now played. A major star in the company’s huge Tokyo Game Show 2025 presence, my visit to the show meant I’ve finally had the opportunity to go hands-on with a title that was announced among the very first cohort of current-gen games way back in 2020, suffering multiple delays on its way to a 2026 release window.
Pragmata puts players into the space boots of Hugh (yep), an intergalactic life insurance auditor (double yep) who finds himself stranded on a lunar research station that’s seemingly been overrun by a hostile AI. This playable section sees Hugh woken from unconsciousness by Diana, an android in the form of a small girl, and the pair setting off together to explore the station, figure out what’s going on and hopefully return home to Earth.
Diana also happens to be the catalyst to what sets Pragmata apart from any other sci-fi action game you’ve played before. While Hugh’s able to wield a variety of weapons to shoot the many killer robots aboard the station, he’s not able to make much of a dent without Diana’s help. This pre-programmed preschooler is blessed with particularly powerful hacking skills, enough that she can breach the exteriors and exoskeletons of your automaton antagonisers and allow you to shoot their weak points for massive damage.
The way this works is that, for as long as you’re holding the left trigger to aim down sights at an enemy, a hacking pop-up appears towards the side of the screen where you’ll use the face buttons to guide a marker around a small grid. Reaching the goal square on this grid will complete the hack, but you also want to avoid blockers and pick up bonus nodes along the way to add other effects to your hack. This is all happening in real-time, mind, with no pause or slow-down to the action, so part of the challenge is simply executing the hack under pressure.
While I was initially unsure of my own competence going into this demo – I find some shooters overwhelming enough with having a whole second bit of gameplay layered on top – but the reality actually feels like the inverse of my fears. Pragmata’s action is incredibly deliberate, and its heavier movement and forgiving shooting model leaves plenty of space to plan your attack and settle into a rhythm.
Hugh’s main weapon is a basic handgun that holds six rechargeable shots, and he can also pick up more powerful gear from around the station, although these all seem to be consumable rather than permanent additions. In the preview I had access to a bola launcher that could immobilise enemy bots as well as a more explosive shotgun-style weapon, both of which were incredibly helpful in a pinch – but with no guarantee that I’d find replacements around the next corner, I had to really think about when and where to employ them.
Nothing exemplified this very compelling shooter paradigm more than a boss encounter at the end of the demo, against a big, menacing mech. Here, I had to put just as much energy into my movement and weapon management as actually opening fire. The mech had a number of powerful attacks to evade, from a dashing strike to a barrage of missiles, so making use of its moments of downtime to quickly hack it and get around to the exposed points on its back was the key to victory. Diana also gained a devastating new ultimate-style move that wound up the finishing blow in this rather thrilling engagement.
Elsewhere in the demo, in the lead-up to the mech encounter, Pragmata seems straightforward enough. I was doing a lot of walking through corridors before being locked into a small area to fend off a few robots and moving on, with some light hacking ‘puzzles’ in-between. Hopefully there’s a little more to all of this as the game goes on, this demo area seemingly taking place in the early moments, but the game feel and overall vibe are definitely an exciting start.
I’m equally interested in seeing how Hugh and Diana’s partnership evolves over the course of Pragmata. This early glimpse seems to imply a bit of the old ‘chance meeting with brat eventually results in a heartwarming paternal bond’ trope with a technological twist, but everything about this game is so promisingly weird that I fully expect there to be so much more to it.
Pragmata is coming to PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC in 2026.
