Capcom first announced Pragmata, an original sci-fi action game, way back in 2020 during a PlayStation State of Play. Three years have passed since its target release date, with the Japanese company only offering the occasional bleak update. Even when Capcom announced that it would finally show Pragmata off at the 2025 Summer Game Fest, many assumed the finished product was doomed.
Sucks to be wrong?
Who knows if Pragmata, which Capcom swears will arrive in 2026, will be the real deal in its final state, but after 20 minutes of hands-on time at SGF, I was left dying to play more. The fluid, frictionless demo offered a combat-forward third-person shooter experience that felt totally fresh — a rare feeling in an SGF sea of Soulslikes and Hades-esque rougelite riffs.
In the demo, spacefarer Hugh meets lost android Diana aboard a lunar research station overrun by killer AI. There’s little time for introduction, as the pair are immediately ambushed by a rickety robot looking to laser them in half. Considering Diana presents as a little doll of a girl — major M3GAN vibes — Hugh’s instinct is to protect her as he fires like mad into the metal assassin. But this is a video game, and Diana turns out to have her own role to play in an adventure that’s maybe more poised to be Capcom’s spin on Banjo-Kazooie than Dadcore classics like The Last of Us and God of War.
As it turns out, Hugh’s bullets are basically useless against the robots’ defenses, at least until Diana climbs up on his back and uses her hacking skillz to crack their interiors. That means each encounter in Pragmata is a combination of both puzzling and shooting. First, players target a bot to execute one of Diana’s hacks, a block puzzle that can either be swiftly completed to briefly stun the robot or more intricately solved to buy Hugh more time. Of course, if the robot is already right next to Hugh, you’ll have to settle for Diana’s speedier solve, hoping to then gain enough distance to do one of her more intricate hacks. Either way, once the bot’s been hobbled by Diana, it’s time for Hugh to open fire — or run like hell to a more strategic vantage point.
This simple gimmick makes those early Pragmata fights a blast. The play is not hyperactive — a two-step combat process means the robots stalk more like George Romero’s slow-walking zombies than the T-1000 — but combinations of bipedal killers and flying drones set a ticking clock to solving the face-offs. A light-touch UI makes it all go down easy, with easy-to-decipher pop-ups that allow you to keep an eye on incoming waves of bots as well as your in-progress hacks.
Most of the demo was set in the lunar base, a highly detailed set that really took advantage of the PS5’s graphical power (will 2026 finally be the year of the current-gen game?). Hugh and Diana navigate the space with the usual array of run and jump moves, plus a jetpack that, in a landscape full of janky aerial mechanics, felt noticeably smooth and as seamless as any other motion in the game. The jetpack was a welcome way of platforming around the lunar base and dodging robots who eluded Hugh’s initial traps. (The astronaut can find the electrical equivalent of a net gun to slow down his adversaries and give Diana much-needed hacking time.) Right off the bat, Pragmata offered a number of equally calibrated item-and-combat combinations that let me play the way I wanted to play based on whatever seemed most fun.
In the demo, there are traces of a story — shit clearly went down at the station, and glimpses from eons ago during the State of Play tease hinted that Hugh might eventually make it down to Earth. But on a play level, Pragmata was a polished and propulsive surprise. One day, we may understand the cost Capcom paid to toil away on a game meant to drop at the height of the PlayStation 5 era, and if there’s even a pathway to success for what was envisioned as a “new, original IP” that took close to a decade to publish. But luckily, very few of us are personally invested in the creation of Pragmata — we just get to play the damn thing. And after SGF, the game will be on my chrome, futuristic space radar until the moment it lands next year.
Capcom says Pragmata will be available in 2026 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam.
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