The third-person shooter style is a wealthy lineage, with builders constructing on the “proper” method to mix gunplay, exploration, and puzzle-solving over the course of many years. We’ve seen these video games undertake sluggish movement, cowl mechanics, and way more, typically iterating on their friends to evolve over time. However that additionally means it’s very uncommon to see a new recreation within the style pop up with an thought I’ve merely… by no means seen earlier than. Enter, Pragmata.
Playable for the primary time at Summer season Recreation Fest 2025, Capcom’s long-awaited recreation lastly confirmed off what it’s all about – and on the coronary heart of all of it was a gameplay mechanic that feels legitimately new.
Pragmata sees you controlling two characters directly: Hugh is an astronaut, stranded in a Lunar base full of seemingly malfunctioning automata; Diana is a mysterious android within the type of a little one, who saves Hugh and promptly piggybacks on his armored spacesuit, providing her capacity to hack components of the bottom – together with these marauding robots.
Mixed, they develop into an extremely efficient unit – Hugh does the capturing, Diana does the hacking, and each are mixed as you play. Even the weakest enemies are lined in hard-to-penetrate armor, however after a fast hack, that armor might be opened up and weakpoints uncovered. In follow, it implies that each single enemy in Pragmata isn’t simply a goal – they’re a puzzle.
Maintain down the left set off to intention your gun and hover the crosshair over an enemy, and a holographic grid puzzle seems on the best of the display screen – your job is to information your cursor throughout the grid (utilizing the face buttons as directional inputs) to a goal sq., at which level Diana will full the hack. Alongside the best way there is likely to be blockers, or further nodes that may be toggled to expose the weakpoints for longer, that means you’ll want to be strategic and environment friendly.
The important thing right here is in how well-balanced this technique is – the sport doesn’t cease or decelerate as you’re hacking, turning every puzzle into a true a part of the motion loop, moderately than a distraction from it. However, equally, no hacking puzzle felt overly advanced, that means I used to be by no means annoyed by having to full it whereas additionally avoiding enemy assaults.
Taken altogether, and it’s a genuinely contemporary method to strategy fight, and one which has big potential for the sport going ahead. My hands-on passed off within the early components of the sport, that means enemy hacks had been pretty fundamental, however even right here there have been nuances. Ranges are tightly packed knots of corridors and wider arenas, with loot and lore to discover – and a few of that loot ties straight into your hacking.
One consumable you’ll discover is Decode – for every pickup you could have, the subsequent hack you carry out will add an additional sq. to the grid that makes your hack simpler in the event you move over it, however will get used up while you do. It begins making you ask the query: do I want to make this enemy simpler to defeat, or ought to I save this for later?
As you’d hope, the normal gunplay round all of this innovation is properly thought-out, too. Whereas I solely had the chance to check out a few weapons in my time with the sport, there’s greater than sufficient to pique curiosity right here. For a begin, after the anticipated pistol and shotgun variants, the third weapon I acquired was a Stasis Internet, a gun that fires out an area-of-effect projectile that slows and shocks something inside – excellent for firing off into a crowd earlier than starting my hacks, earlier than switching to apunchier weapon to end them off. There additionally seems to be a degree system for weapons, presumably letting you swap in higher variations of the identical weapons as you discover them.
Hugh can be a extra cellular character than you may count on from his cumbersome-looking armor – he’s geared up with thrusters that allow him sprint, increase into the air, and hover. One enemy kind will smash the bottom to ship out a shockwave, which necessitates you pondering vertically in addition to laterally – a sort of pondering extra acquainted from platformers than shooters.
And on the coronary heart of all of it, Hugh and Diana already really feel like a genuinely fascinating dynamic to observe throughout a entire recreation – even except for the thriller surrounding them, there’s a humor and heat to their dialogue that lends Pragmata a lightness of contact at odds with its medical, industrial world.
As a full package deal, this was the right method to reintroduce a recreation first introduced way back to 2020 – Pragmata has moved from being a curiosity, firmly into my most-anticipated checklist.
Pragmata comes to Xbox Collection X|S in 2026.