Pragmata Review
Would you fall in love with a tool if it could talk to you? If it was made to look and behave like a person, could it become one? Or would you be the one imbuing it with that meaning?
Even though Pragmata was a major release from Capcom, I wasn’t that interested in what I saw of it beforehand. The image of a little girl standing on the back of a guy in a bulky, stylized spacesuit just seemed odd to me. Playing it didn’t really change my mind about it being weird, but I ended up liking the combat and the exploration more than I expected.
I don’t really see this becoming a big franchise. Maybe it’ll get a sequel. The story is OK, but by the end the main villain drags it into dime-store novel territory. There were opportunities for more drama and realism, or at least more depth to some of its ideas, but instead it often plays out more like an anime.
Hugh, the main character, is a good guy. Very PG. He names the little android girl D-I-0336–7 “Diana,” which felt uninspired to me, and gradually starts caring for her like a parent. He calls her “kiddo” and is always nice and supportive, but that’s about as complicated as he gets. He’s safe and vanilla.
Diana is a pragmata, a special kind of android, and she was weird to me from the beginning. She’s presented almost entirely like a little human girl despite obviously not being one. She even runs around barefoot the entire game, her feet slapping against the floors, which was another detail that never felt right to me. Her appearance at least makes sense within the story, since the scientist who created the pragmata had left his daughter behind on Earth.
What I did like was how useful Diana is to you as a player. If there’s an item nearby, she’ll hint at it. She’ll call attention to where you should go and tell you when to dodge. Sometimes I was split between appreciating the help and getting tired of hearing the same commands over and over, or feeling like it was too hand-holdy. Someone who hasn’t played games for as many years as I have may feel differently.
The best part of Pragmata is the combat. You use Diana to “hack” enemies by moving up, down, left and right across a grid with the controller’s four face buttons while also moving Hugh around and dodging incoming attacks. Once you finish the hack, the enemy becomes vulnerable and you can start damaging it with Hugh’s weapons. It keeps you focused because you’re juggling the hacking with positioning and dodging.
There is no melee, which feels off.
The shooting feels good too. You’ll probably use the basic handgun for a large part of the game, and hitting enemy weak points has a satisfying feeling of weight. There are a dozen other secondary weapons (with limited ammo) including a shotgun, charged rifle, stasis weapon and others that can change how you approach fights.
Eventually you have six weapon slots, along with different hacking nodes and mods that give bonuses like opening weak points, chaining hacks between enemies, increasing damage or earning more currency. On paper it sounds like it should create different builds and play styles.
In practice, I never found that side of the combat especially deep during my playthrough. Most enemies slowly move toward you instead of aggressively rushing you, which gives you plenty of room to work through the hacking board that takes up about a third of the screen. I’m sure harder difficulties require more skill and better use of all the systems, but playing through the story I rarely felt pressured to really master them.
That doesn’t mean the combat is bad. Hacking, dodging, targeting weak points and deciding which weapons to use gives you enough to think about, and the handful of larger boss fights were satisfying even when they weren’t especially difficult. The game gives you a lot of options; I just never felt like I needed most of them.
The areas you explore are fairly straightforward. Usually you fight your way in one direction to unlock a door somewhere else, but the environments pack in a surprising number of twists, side paths and hard-to-spot routes to items considering how small some of them are.
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You also unlock hatches that take you back to a central area where you can purchase upgrades and access things like training missions, outfits and gifts for Diana. The game is generous with these checkpoints, so it’s not something like Dark Souls where you’re desperately searching for the next bonfire. You can also return to previous areas, and the game tells you what collectibles you’re still missing.
Like with a lot of games, though, I eventually reach a point where I have to decide whether I want to do everything or just finish the story and move on. With Pragmata, I gradually moved toward the latter.
The training missions were where that started. They put you into different timed scenarios, like platforming through a course or destroying all the enemies while meeting up to three objectives. They’re mostly fun and do a good job of highlighting the game’s core mechanics, but they get increasingly difficult. To earn all the rewards you have to complete all three objectives in the same run, which can mean replaying them many times.
Eventually I got tired of doing that. Once I accepted that I was going to skip some items and an outfit, my interest in completing everything started to fall off from there. I had rented the game rather than bought it, so I was also ready to send it back and move on to something else. If I had bought it, there’s enough optional content and replayability that I wouldn’t have felt unsatisfied. But I didn’t get invested in it.
That also describes how I felt about the story. I was fine with it for a while, but the middle and especially the final part let me down. The real villain is another pragmata girl, and her reasoning for wanting to destroy the world takes a backwards, silly leap. I was much more interested in learning about the doctor who created them, but the game never goes very deep into any of it.
At one point Hugh gets hit in the side by a huge spike. It’s presented like a serious injury, but there’s no visible tearing to his suit and he hides it from Diana while you go right back to playing normally. I felt like it could have affected the gameplay somehow and made the injury feel important. Instead the game signals that it’s serious, forgets about it, and then brings it back when the story needs it.
That kind of thing kept me at a distance from what the story wanted me to feel, and the biggest example was Hugh and Diana themselves.
Hugh treats Diana like a little girl who’s going to learn, grow and eventually see the world. He wants to protect her and get her to Earth so she can be free. The game treats that as naturally meaningful, but I kept getting stuck on what that actually means.
Diana isn’t a little girl. She’s a unique android built on the Moon. Her creator is gone. So what kind of life is she supposed to have on Earth? Is she going to live among people? Is Hugh going to keep taking care of her? Does she grow up in any meaningful sense, or does she remain like this indefinitely?
Maybe those questions aren’t supposed to matter. The point may simply be that Hugh has come to see Diana as a person and wants her to have a life of her own. But I never completely made that jump with him.
That’s what I kept coming back to from early in the game. If a machine can talk to you, depend on you, make jokes, show fear and act like a child, at what point do you stop seeing it as a machine? Has it actually become a person, or have you started treating it like one?
Hugh clearly believes Diana is more than a tool. By the end of Pragmata, I understood why he cared about her. I just wasn’t sure the game had convinced me to feel the same way.
The combat did. That’s what kept me playing. Pragmata is a solid, sometimes fun game built around a combat system that feels more interesting than the story. There are plenty of systems, collectibles and optional challenges for someone who wants to dig deeper into it.
For me, though, once the story was over, I was ready to move on.
It’s an average to above-average game with a good core idea, solid combat and a relationship at the center of it that I found more interesting to question than to actually believe in.
