Happy about: Pragmata

Capcom used to stick with safe releases. New Monster Hunter or Street Fighter game, remaking a Resident Evil title that was already good and doesn’t need remaking, maybe even making a new Resident Evil game to varying levels of quality. But in the past few years, they’ve started to spice things up with unexpected things. Less than two years ago they released Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess – a fantastic and weird mix of hack and slash action and tower defense. This year, the surprise is Pragmata – a very curious mix of different ideas that starts really well and ends… alright.

Since the most interesting thing about Pragmata is its gameplay structure and mechanics, I will start with them. For all intents and purposes, this is an over the shoulder third person shooter, but you have a lot of movement options (like jumping and dodging) and, most importantly, you can and must hack enemies during the combat. Which isn’t done in the style of NieR: Automata, where the gameplay switches to an entirely different mini-game during hacking, but rather – as you aim at the enemies, the hacking UI is added to the gameplay and you have to move through the nodes of that UI while the rest of the gameplay is happening. It seems overwhelming at first, but for most of the game, this idea is handled really well, with easy to memorize general patterns and lots of tools that help you with the process. So by the end, you will be easily shooting, hacking, moving camera and dodging at the same time and it feels very fresh and fun.

Since I’ve mentioned jumping, you can imagine that there are platforming challenges too. Most of them are entirely optional and are about exploring the levels and finding cool stuff. Since you will be looking for different upgrade elements and currency and also mods that bring passive (or sometimes even active) changes to your gameplay. There’s an entire separate collection of challenging training missions too, which are clearly inspired by the Metal Gear/Death Stranding VR Missions.

Which brings us to structure, because if hacking is easy to understand even from trailers and screenshots, the structure of the game turned out to be different from what I’ve expected. In a way, the game reminded me of Demon’s Souls mixed with ideas from different Mega Man titles. There’s a “Shelter”, which is a homebase you always start in and always return to if you die. And from that Shelter, you can go to different locations that get unlocked as you progress through the game. In said locations you will be unlocking shortcuts, that serve as checkpoints, so you don’t need to do the whole level from the start if you die. If you do die, all of the key fights do not respawn, all of the main progress through the level is saved but otherwise all “normal” enemies do respawn in the exact same locations and same ways as you’ve encountered them the first time.

As such, you’re basically meant to go on these little “expeditions” into the level and progress until you feel content (or die), after which you will return to the Shelter to upgrade stuff, do optional things, grab a loadout of weapons and mods and go back into the level. Oh and yeah, the weapons, apart from your main one, have limited ammo and are discarded once depleted, so you have to pick up stuff on the level and adapt all of the time. And the limited heals heal pretty poorly too, so everything about the game is designed to make you want to go back and regroup, as that will refill your health and resources for free.

I have to say, for the first… maybe two thirds of the game, this worked really well. The game isn’t easy, but it’s manageable on the normal difficulty, so I was getting a similar adventurous excitement to what I felt exploring Demon’s Souls back in 2010. And the overall balance between the complexity of enemies and fights, given that you need to hack things and know how to utilize your weapons and mods effectively, was very solid. But the last third of the game becomes more messy and annoying than anything else. The balance is lost and some fights or enemy types and configurations become really annoying to deal with. Even the training missions become quite unhinged at times, while for the most part they are very fun. So when I finally got to the ending and then unlocked the cool new post-game mode and new game plus and a harder difficulty… I just didn’t want to continue.

Oh and speaking of the ending, or the story in general, it’s as subtle as a trout slap to the face. Game starts and within minutes our main character talks that robots are untrustworthy and kids are annoying, but then few minutes later becomes best friends (and a father figure) to a kid cyborg. Every trope you can imagine follows suit. And look, Capcom were never on the forefront of smart writing and at least this story isn’t as insultingly moronic as what happens in Resident Evil Requiem, but the potential for a genuinely good story was here, and it never comes. Made me remember the fantastic Binary Domain, which had its own share of issues, but was brilliantly written in comparison. But hey, it is presented and told well enough. The music is solid. The visuals are wonderful. So the story being primitive isn’t that distracting.

Pragmata is absolutely worth playing, especially if you’ve checked the demo and enjoyed it. It would benefit from a slight rebalance and polishing for the later stages and the training missions, but even if Capcom decide not to do so, the game is good as is. I ended up enjoying it less than how much I expected to, but I still enjoyed it a lot. Oh and, there are so many little things that are reminiscent of Dino Crisis 3 it’s genuinely odd. It was a dreadfully boring game, but there were some neat ideas, so it is nice to see them not fully forgotten. Anyway – Pragmata is a great new experiment from Capcom and while it doesn’t land as gracefully as Kunitsu-Gami, it’s still worth playing.