Pragmata Review
It's been a while since I've just written my thoughts on a single game, and I have quite a lot of thoughts about Capcom's third-person shooter Pragmata. This will be a spoiler-free review and, of course, a very subjective look at one of my favorite games of the year so far.
It's a common phenomenon to feel like a game was made for you specifically, and that's pretty much how I feel about Pragmata. It plays in third-person over-the-shoulder view, which is my favorite perspective, and it adds a puzzle element to the action, giving it an appealing cerebral layer instead of being just another sci-fi shooter.
The plot follows an everyman who becomes a parental figure to a young girl (who's also a robot), and despite not having children of my own, I'm a sucker for a story about an adult who suddenly finds themself taking care of a kid. It's part of the reason I love Claire Redfield so much in Resident Evil 2, especially the remake -- because her relationship with Sherry tugs at the heartstrings in a realistic way.
In the words of the great Whitney Houston, I believe the children are our future, and we have a responsibility as a society to collectively nurture and protect them and not just abandon or disregard them because we didn't physically produce them. I like narratives that acknowledge this, even if the kid in question is a robot capable of hacking complex systems.
Plenty has been written about how Pragmata's story isn't deep or intellectually resonant, and for the most part I agree. But I think the environmental storytelling does a lot of heavy lifting. If you play the game straight through without exploring its world or doing any of its extra content, you can finish it fairly quickly and you'll be left with a surface-level story.
But if you attempt to 100% it, you'll get conversations between Hugh (the pseudo-dad) and Diana (the robot kid) that flesh out their characters, and you'll also find things left behind by people who worked at the lunar station before Hugh arrived and found it in its abandoned state. It's still not incredibly deep, but I don't think a story necessarily always has to be, especially in a video game with a high level of interactivity. Sometimes it's okay to just be a normal good-natured dude who finds an equally good-natured robot friend.
The combat is where Pragmata really shines, and it's honestly the most fun I've had with a game in a while. Hugh can obtain several different weapons, but they're useless without Diana's hacking ability. Through an engaging maze puzzle that gets more complicated as you progress, Diana lowers enemies' defenses so Hugh can get to their weak spots and blast them apart. You're always doing two things in tandem: hacking and shooting. There's a brilliant rhythm to it that I've never quite experienced in any other game. It doesn't surprise me that Capcom, the developer who gave us Leon's deft dance-like combat moves in Resident Evil 4 and its remake, came up with this satisfying system.
Pragmata is just a lot of fun, and I feel like it has universal appeal. It has a puzzle element for people who dislike pure shooters. It's not terribly difficult, but it does have an unlockable "lunatic" mode and a demanding series of training sessions for those who want more of a challenge. It has an arcade-y feel for people who simply want to play a game, but there's enough of a story to satisfy those who want to feel something, especially if you accept the default ending as canon and if you pay attention to what the human residents of the lunar base have to say about being replaced by AI.
It's not a perfect game, but it establishes what it wants to do and then completely follows up on that promise. It delivers its narrative well, even if it's not the most intellectual example of storytelling. It expands on its systems in comfortable increments that feel natural as you go along. And it feels really, really good to play.