Pragmata proves a great game only needs one great idea

It's been a long time coming for Pragmata. Capcom's new sci-fi third-person shooter first debuted with a memorably vague trailer during a showcase of PS5 games — before the PS5 even came out — then entered a prolonged period of radio silence. Three or four years ago, you could've convinced me the project was canceled, as so many new-console-showcase games often are.

However, almost six years later, Pragmata is here, it's real, and it kicks ass.

The action game gurus at Capcom have crafted another inventive, tightly designed, and (in this instance) surprisingly heartfelt adventure that stands out in a world where so many big-budget games seemingly want you to never play anything else. Pragmata doesn't have a long bullet-point list of features; instead, it stretches one unique gameplay hook to the extreme for no more than 10 to 12 hours.

Between its excellent hacking-based combat and touchingly sincere interactions between its two protagonists, Pragmata has a real argument as being one of the best recent games in Capcom's portfolio, and that's no small thing if you've been keeping up with Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, and the like over the last seven or eight years.

Meet Hugh and Diana. You'll love them.

For almost all of Pragmata's story, there are two characters with speaking roles. It's a good thing they're both easy to love.

Players step into the spacesuit boots of Hugh Williams, an exceedingly normal man sent to a futuristic moon base called the Cradle on a repair mission, only to find that the Cradle's entire human staff has been exterminated by angry 3D-printed robots who nominally exist for maintenance and assistance purposes. After the rest of Hugh's repair crew unceremoniously eats it within the first 20 minutes of the game's story, Hugh meets up with a mysterious little robot girl named Diana, who spends the rest of Pragmata riding around on his shoulders as the two try to escape the Cradle and get back to Earth.

Pragmata's story has some twists and turns, many of them predictable if you pay any attention to the various text and audio logs left behind by the former human crew of the Cradle. It's a perfectly fine excuse to romp through a cool moon base full of 3D-printed architecture and freaky robots, but it's unlikely to win any narrative awards at the end of the year. That's fine, though, because the story's main purpose is linking Hugh and Diana together, giving Pragmata some real emotional juice it wouldn't have otherwise.

Over the past 10-ish years, video games have been plagued by stories about sad dads learning to become regular people by virtue of having to escort and protect kids through some perilous journey. The Last of Us and Sony's recent God of War reboot games come to mind. Pragmata could have easily fallen down this same hole, but instead, its writers made the gloriously correct decision to give Hugh and Diana more of an uncle/niece relationship instead. Their conversations can be playful and goofy as often as they are sincere and emotional, and Hugh seems to delight in being able to teach Diana (who has never been to Earth) what it's like to live on the human homeworld as they traipse through artificial facsimiles of Earth-like environments.

I'm especially fond of the 3D-printed Times Square environment that's been shown off in various trailers, but rest assured that Pragmata has plenty of environmental variety despite its setting, and it all looks gorgeous and runs flawlessly on a PS5 Pro.

Anyway, most importantly, Hugh is not some traumatized, damaged, sad bastard who needs a child to fill an emotional void in his heart like Joel or Kratos. His backstory isn't entirely pleasant, but for the most part, he's a nice guy who's had a pretty good life full of people who love him, and he's fully aware of that. Hugh spends much of Pragmata extolling the virtues of human love and companionship to Diana, which I found refreshingly positive compared to the overwhelming misanthropy of something like The Last of Us.

All of that characterization manages to transcend what is otherwise a fairly standard sci-fi story, coming to a head in an emotionally satisfying conclusion.

Hack, shoot, and dash your way to freedom

Pragmata's narrative elements elevate the experience, to be sure, but they are not the reason why I think you should play it. Rather, I think you should play Pragmata because the part where you fight robots is as fun and clever as any third-person shooter has been in the past few years.

If you haven't been following along (there's a free demo on every platform that you should check out), Pragmata is a shooter where your guns don't really hurt enemies by default. Their robotic exoskeletons are nearly impervious to conventional weaponry, which is where Diana comes in. She uses her android powers to hack enemies, causing them to expose weak points that Hugh can then shoot.

This is done through a simple hacking minigame that accompanies the shooting. When you aim at an enemy, a grid will appear on screen that you navigate through using the four face buttons. The idea is to navigate through beneficial hacking nodes while avoiding harmful ones on the way to a final "complete hack" node, all in real-time as enemies are coming towards Hugh with ill intent. Put more simply, you're completing a little maze on-screen while also trying to avoid and shoot bad guys.

You might think that adding one additional layer to what is otherwise a pretty normal-feeling shooter wouldn't be that big of a deal, but you'd be wrong. The developers at Capcom manage to wring everything they can out of this hacking minigame, as the player gradually unlocks new nodes with different effects, a gauge that builds up with each successful hack that you can expend on more powerful hacks, and some other fun abilities I won't spoil.

Pragmata also has a ton of enemy variety, so while you're just trying to shoot humanoids in the head at the start of the game, combat strategy becomes significantly more interesting and dynamic by the end.

In practice, Pragmata takes what works about recent Resident Evil combat (namely, the tension of carefully aiming at weak points as enemies slowly, ominously trudge towards you), adds all of this fun hacking nonsense, and even adds an acrobatic dash function to the mix. It culminates in something that is extremely fun to do from the very first fight until the final confrontation.

It's also got multiple satisfying upgrade systems that benefit from careful exploration, as secret areas throughout the world are usually filled with exceptionally useful rewards. Pragmata is generally pretty linear, but paying attention to hidden nooks and crannies is every bit as important here as it is in any recent RE game.

I could keep going on about how cool it feels to do a slow-motion perfect dash out of the way of a big boss attack, complete a hack in mid-air, and bombard its weak point with ultra-crunchy space shotgun blasts, but really, you should see it for yourself. Pragmata makes quality use of all its systems, rewards experimentation with different kinds of builds and weapons, and its best challenges ask you to incorporate everything you've learned along the way. I can't really ask for much more out of a great action game.

Well, there is one small thing: It can be kind of hard to wrap your head around hacking when there are lots of enemies on screen. Sometimes, simply locking onto the right one can be a bit of a chore in those circumstances. It's not a big deal, but if the game has one flaw in its combat, it's that.

Pragmata isn't super long, but it makes an impact

I was able to finish Pragmata in about eight hours, but a completionist mindset might stretch that out to 12 to 15 at most. If I have one real complaint about Pragmata beyond its occasionally muddled group combat scenarios and somewhat utilitarian story, it's that I do wish there was just a little more of it. It's less that the game is too short and more that it's so good that I was sad when it was over.

But maybe that's alright. In a world of Crimson Desert-like games that try to do everything at once, maybe we need more experiences like Pragmata. The world of big-budget games would definitely benefit from smaller-scale games with extremely tight, focused design like this. Pragmata was clearly the product of one great idea, and everything that's great about it can be traced back to it.

That's all a game needs.