Pragmata is Capcom’s entry in the “dad sim” genre of games where a middle-aged protagonist journeys with a young sidekick and wholesome things happen. It’s also an odd blend of third person shooter and Soulslike. While that mish-mash of genres and the unique hacking mechanic might give the impression that this is a super innovative game, most of it is going to be familiar if you’ve played any of the games that inspired it. Pragmata just wants to let you be the fun dad in a straightforward shooting adventure, and it does an amazing job of that. For half of the game, anyway.
Pragmata‘s kid character is Diana, a robot with the appearance and personality of a six year old. Capcom mercifully chose to spare us the introduction to most dad sim games where the player character is an ass to the kid character, so you get the wholesome stuff right away without having to learn not to be mean to children. Diana is endearingly written and has a lot of fun interactions to find through exploration, but it’s worth knowing that story is not this game’s priority. There’s almost nothing going on with any of the characters in the game except to either set up wholesome Diana moments or justify shooting a bunch of robots. It’s a charming game, but it barely has a coherent story.
You’ll spend most of your time with Pragmata in combat. Enemies all have nearly impenetrable armor, so you’ll have to hack it open with Diana’s magic powers unless you want to spend 20 minutes on each enemy. If you’re playing on mouse and keyboard like most PC players presumably will for a shooter, hacking is performed by aiming at an enemy with right mouse, holding alt, and then navigating a maze in the corner of the screen by moving the mouse. Hacking does not pause the game, so you still need to be paying attention to enemies and potentially dodging around while solving the maze. It’s a neat idea that I haven’t seen anything close to before, and it can really make some encounters feel more tense.
Outside of combat, Pragmata is a largely linear game with some short side paths to get collectibles or fight challenge areas. Some side paths can only be accessed if you come back to an area after getting upgrades, and some require limited keys that you might not have on hand. One of the later areas adds (mostly very simple) puzzle solving, but otherwise you’re just progressing from fight room to fight room and taking detours to get collectibles. If you take a break at an escape hatch, the game’s equivalent to bonfires, you can go back to the sanctuary to buy upgrades and rearm, as well as turning in some collectibles for more Diana content. This is also where the optional training challenges are, although these are basically just fight rooms with conditions.
Pragmata‘s gameplay loop is solid until somewhere around the halfway mark. The first area does a great job of setting up the mysterious atmosphere of an abandoned moon colony, and the second area is the wild fake New York from all the trailers. I’d hoped to see similarly creative locations for the remaining levels, but it’s all very standard scifi from that point on. Diana and the fun combat carry the game for a while after the level design falters, but by the end the game is pretty thoroughly out of ideas. Combat devolves into putting you into ever smaller rooms against hordes of overly spongy enemies and while Diana remains precious, her lack of any character arc or real motivations means she can only do so much to keep things interesting. I wouldn’t quite say that it overstays its welcome, but it would have if it had taken much more than 15 hours to roll credits.
Conclusion
I expected this to be a solid GotY contender when I was halfway through, but unfortunately the quality just isn’t there throughout the game. Even though I don’t really regret paying full price, I’d recommend everyone else wait for a good sale.
Rating: 75%
Price: $60
Time to beat: 15 hours to do almost everything on NG+
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For more reviews, see my Steam curator page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43219041
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