Pragmata Review: A Simple, Satisfactory Follow-up to the Citizen Evil Requirement

With artificial intelligence changing the way people work and live, it’s no surprise that Capcom’s new sci-fi game Pragmata incorporates that concept to create a new take on the third-person shooter. The game successfully remixed Resident Evil style action with fluid gameplay and a somewhat challenging campaign. For anyone who has been too traumatized to try a Resident Evil game, this is a great alternative. For those who just want more of the latest Resident Evil Requiem, this is a good chaser.

Many modern sci-fi games focus on endlessly expanding games, such as Starfield and No Man’s Sky. Pragma is a compact experience that packs a lot of action and fun mechanics. A breath of fresh air for anyone looking for cool robots on a cool weekend, to hang out with your AI stepdaughter and get to the bottom of the mystery of space.

Pragmata has the look and feel of a Resident Evil game — it’s built on the Resident Evil Requiem engine — but delivers enough of its own experience with a unique mid-battle mechanic. While the main character, Hugh, shoots robot enemies with guns, his Android AI host daughter, Diana, can hack an enemy to make them vulnerable or disabled. It added another punch to the giggles in the tense chases that occasionally frustrated me, but it’s a satisfying challenge to the tried-and-true third-person shooter.

In game mechanics and character relationships, Diana is the core of Pragmata’s appeal. Your happiness as a player will depend on how much you like having 3 feet of beautiful blonde armed girl tagging along and helping you fight. I personally found him charming, especially in the quiet moments between missions when I would give him a basketball court or a swingset I found in the field to freshen up our antiseptic space shelter. He, too, would give me a crayon drawing that should be perfect on the fridge. But I also found his kewpie voice annoying. You play Pragmata with or without him.

I got about half of the game, so I don’t have any final thoughts on how satisfying the relationship ends up being, but the gameplay is also minute by minute… okay. In the battles, you are important, you need to unlock the enemies with a little hacking game that involves navigating a small maze while the enemies fight for you. While playing on the 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 run. It’s a bit of a beast, but it increases the risk of slow robot enemies (some of which sound like reanimated zombies).

In the first few hours, I clocked Pragmata as a tamer Space Resident Evil with a signature man-daughter fight quirk (we could have had this in Requiem if Leon had let Grace ride piggyback and start blasting). But Capcom’s new game is more fun than scary in transforming the third-person shooter game format into a science-fiction setting, stripping down the complex lore and mechanics to a minimal experience. Pragmata is a powerful experience in all its restraint — a short, intense action title with enough heart to keep the player hooked.

With Pragmata, less is more

Pragmata spends little time getting players into the action. The game opens with a short scene that introduces the main character Hugh, and his three companions who come to a suspiciously quiet lunar colony owned by Delphi, an Apple-meets-SpaceX wonder megacorp. Minutes later, a moonquake separates the group and lands Hugh in the lap of an android who has been designed, for reasons not yet clear to me, to look and talk like a 5-year-old white girl. Hugh calls his Diana immediately.

It’s clear that Capcom wanted players to bond and care for a young child, the latest in a line of unlikely fathers learning to care for their fake daughters (The Last of Us, The Witcher 3, BioShock Infinite, Telltale’s The Walking Dead). The twist, aside from Diana’s potential main purpose as a Pragmata-type android, is that she’s a tough robot that isn’t in any real danger, not even from fire extinguishers. Rather than requiring the player to constantly take care of her — similar to other young women who need to be accompanied, like Ashley in Resident Evil 4 — the game reduces the main character’s role to guiding Diana to humanity, rather than preserving her fragile existence.

This is one of the many ways Pragmata (the game) is easier than it could be, and arguably a better experience for it. Players have a self-reloading main gun and a special ammo weapon. They also have slots for two other types of special-purpose guns or tools that affect the battlefield, from stasis nets to decoys that distract enemies. There are no major weapons — it’s a matter of choosing which options you want to fight with.

There’s even more depth of customization for players who want to dive deeper into the game’s unlockables, including dozens of active modes and bonuses for Diana’s hacking powers, many of which are tucked away in the corners of the various phases of the moon. There are optional simulation challenge levels that players can tackle to power up Hugh or unlock lore files and costumes.

Pragmata: Not hard, not easy, just satisfying

Pragmata’s simple systems leave players free to focus on progressing through the game’s sequence, which is divided into room after room of simple, satisfying challenges. Most are different combinations of enemies of increasing difficulty, each of which needs to be hacked to be vulnerable to Hugh’s guns. Another involves opening doors by scanning hidden lock surfaces, which requires a light field and sniffing up, down and around the corners of the atrial fields. I’m not frustrated or bored, I’m sighing with relief from the game.

Rounding out each of the aforementioned stages are boss battles — mega-bots that fire rockets that are satisfyingly unique as they hit the ground and charge up maps, pushing players to hack while on the run. It’s a fun endurance test that’s surprisingly well-tuned. At one point, after some sloppy play, the 3rd place boss made me feel better, and I spent the next 5 minutes locked in, never really getting the win. Worst of all, I had to try to fight each boss once; somehow, Capcom has avoided the trend of making the bosses challenging enough, but not so much the level of Soulsborne that is so hard that each one takes multiple attempts to defeat.

Hard game ickos can be turned off (hard difficulty is available after beating the game), but I’m happy with the precise level of challenge the bosses and enemies have put in all of Pragmata: I come, I fight, I go forward. This is a smooth affair, with enemies at a satisfying pace throughout the story and the developing relationship between Hugh and Diana. I run, jump, hack and shoot, the momentum needed to keep me from asking condescending questions like “why didn’t I make old androids?” and “why is an ultra-smart android drawing pictures of Hugh at all, let alone made by 5-year-olds in crayon?”

In the end, I don’t care too much, because being given a crayon drawing from a character who is the main character’s adopted daughter is humanizing. And in these few oddly thought-out moments, Pragmata has plenty of smooth action between Hugh and Diana who work as a fun team.

And every once in a while, the game pauses for a minute or two to let a man from Earth tell a robot born on the moon what it’s like to live on the blue planet. It might not make sense that an android would care, but the game is set up in such a way that its crimes are minor, and I’ll let it carry me on its mindless, honest train for a long time. There’s probably a rad boss battle ahead though.