PRAGMATA Review: Capcom’s New IP is An Adorable Lunarcapitalist Satire

When Capcom revealed Pragmata to the world, the internet responded with a resounding ‘Guy who has only played Death Stranding, seeing his second game: Getting a lot of ‘Death Stranding’ vibes from this’. This lazy narrative surrounding the game has somehow persisted all the way up to launch, even though it is clearly a very different kind of experience from anything Kojima Productions has put out. Sure, the aesthetic similarities are there. PRAGMATA is post-apocalyptic fiction, featuring plenty of lunar-futurist greebles and cut-carbon installations. You play as a slightly grumpy older man who opens up with the help of a mysteriously powerful child, and constantly return to a shelter replete with endearing tchotchkes that remind you of a quotidian reality that seems, now, to be painfully far away.

But then, as soon as you start actually playing it, PRAGMATA reveals its hand. Here, you don’t rip off your toenails to deliver absurdly structured exosuits’ worth of cargo. Instead, you clunk, thunk and thrust your way through an abandoned space station possessed by evil robots, deftly hacking their software with an arcade meta-game to then damage their hardware with your weapons. Pretty bold of Capcom to go ahead and come up with a new combat system in the year of our lord 2026. You can compare it to stuff like Watch Dogs, Quickhacks in Cyberpunk 2077, and how 9S plays in NieR: Automata, but nobody has yet nailed the moment-to-moment synergy of gunplay and hacking quite like this.

When you aim down sights in range of an enemy, you can use the face buttons to orient through a maze-like grid towards a green square. Get there in time without taking a hit, and you’ll damage the target and make their weak spots ripe for gunfire. The problem is that when you’re ADS, you can fire your weapon, but you can’t jump or move very fast, so you have to get through the minigame quickly — and complete it multiple times during an encounter to keep sustaining damage, and allowing yourself the room to avoid it.

To my beleaguered games journalist fingers, this feels a bit like committing an attack rotation in World of Warcraft Classic. Easy in theory, but hard to master in practice, because of all the entropic context you have to consider. There’s the obvious issue of multiple enemies, and the danger of an out-of-focus foe closing in too fast. But Capcom takes these quirks to a delightful extreme. Some fire homing missiles at Hugh, or throw up a malleable physical shield that blocks part of the hacking interface. Sometimes they’re a lunar sand worm that you can’t damage outside of the rare moments it decides to surface for air. Capcom has a reputation for making challenging but rewarding games, and PRAGMATA follows this dynastic directive — it’s tricky, but bloody satisfying when everything starts coming up Milhouse.

The technology that PRAGMATA’s narrative and characters orbit around is Lunafilament. Imagine a world where you can 3D print anything you want, and for it to be an exact copy of the item you proposed to replicate. In PRAGMATA’s world, this miracle substance was discovered on the moon, and the lunar research station dedicated to studying it has had a lot of fun playing in this artificial sandbox. Maybe too much, seeing as it has now gone dark. There’s a whole mockup of New York City to explore here, complete with yellow taxis, billboards, shopfronts and movie posters. But if you take a second to look a bit closer, it’s replete with jutting errors and artificialities. It’s like the architect got bored while they were making it. Hmm.

PRAGMATA’s glistening metropolitan vistas and earthy-but-not-actually-earthy biomes are staggering to look at on the PS5 Pro — hats off to the game’s technical artists — but within PRAGMATA’s oeuvre, these places are meant to look a bit broken, and are embedded with a real melancholy. The researchers at this station took the infinite-energy argument to its logical endpoint. They figured out how to do Minecraft’s Creative Mode in real life, but in the absence of the thrill that Survival Mode provides, they realised that everything became purely practical and depressing. We’ve all been there, eh? Except it didn’t have the same sort of existential weight or summon legions of robustly-carapaced construction robots.

There are only a handful of spaces in PRAGMATA, but they are carefully gated by lengthy puzzles and deadly boss battles. They’re also designed to be revisited heavily, and checkpointed by bonfire-like save points, where Hugh & Diana — our protagonists, I’m sure you can denote who’s who — climb down an escape hatch back to a shelter. Here’s where all the upgrading and some of the bond-building between this unlikely duo of depressed man and genius android child take place. If you explore during your embarkations, you’ll find currencies and materials that you can trade for faster thrusters, permanent weapon upgrades and pure stat boosts that help you in battle. It’s a bit Soulslike in this way, but weird enough to not feel derivative.

However, you can also find Read Earth Memories throughout the station, which are digital shadows of Earthly trinkets and playthings like building blocks, campfires, easels and slides. When you bring these replicas back to the shelter, Diana, the lost android girl Hugh is reluctantly shepherding, will engage with them, as only a curious kid-bot can. She’ll watch TV patiently, then assess and rebuke its time-wasting qualities.

She’ll scribble heart-rending drawings of your adventures, and stick them up on the cold carbon exterior of your upgrade station. Her adopted home becomes a museum of what life would be like if she were in better climes, as a beloved kid on Earth. There was a part of the game where I started rushing through the motions of the shelter before I realised that this was the beating heart of PRAGMATA. Watching Diana run around her adopted home with a balloon in her mitts, marvelling at its electrostatic properties, is where the soul of this experience lies, outside of its moreish combat and spirited visual design.

PRAGMATA is a clever character study best embodied by its protagonists. Diana is made of Lunafilament and sees the world in stark black-and-white. Hugh is a human, but he feels like a cog in an ugly machine, on what looks like a suicide mission to fix a problem created by an anhedonic upper management. In being thrust together, Hugh teaches Diana about humanity’s common values and, in doing so, restores his own, which had been crushed under the boot of a spacebound hypercapitalism. The way this plays out over fifteen-or-so hours of station-pilfering is refreshing, and even though I did find myself baulking at some of the more relentless sectors of puzzlecraft, I was never too far away from a cute bit of chatter or a jaw-dropping new biome to ground me back in this game’s inimitable world.

The Verdict

I was enthralled by PRAGMATA’s mechanical curiosity first — the way its hack-and-dash combat system is persistently complicated with new nodes, weapons and skill-checking enemy variants is classy. This is a meaty wedge of combat cleverness from Capcom that feels like a rare experiment inside the AAA apparatus. But beyond the rewarding battles with eclectic foes, it was PRAGMATA’s poignant story that kept me playing. Here, Capcom blends the heartfelt intertwining of two ghosts in a pernicious machine with a punchy satire of accelerated capitalism — it’s not what I was expecting at all, but I left feeling enriched and keen to recommend this bold new experience.