At Summer Game Fest 2025, I got to spend about 30 minutes playing Capcom’s long gestating Pragmata, and ever since, I have not stopped thinking about the combat system. Not only did the combat surprise me, but the specific style of sci-fi here feels much chunkier and more mechanical than other games, giving a nice weight to it.
A puzzle-shooter?
The biggest takeaway from my time with Pragmata was the combat system, which has a unique blend of frantic puzzle solving and third-person shooting. You play as Hugh, who has come to a colony on the Moon to presumably stop a rampant AI, and he meets Diana, an AI Android girl who saves him shortly after his arrival.
In combat, you play as Hugh with Diana on his back. Enemies have tough armor that your weapons are useless against, so first, you have to hack them with Diana. Hacking brings up a small grid, where you have to use the face buttons to quickly navigate your square through the gates of the grid before reaching the end. Combat does not stop for this, nor does it slow down, forcing you to work fast before you get interrupted. I felt like I could do these puzzles extremely fast, and there were still moments when enemies reached me before I finished.
This dynamic creates a fun combat flow, especially when there are multiple enemies. You have to maintain your distance, pick one to take out, and use weapons like a trap gun that shoots a net that stuns enemies, to complete your hacks before unloading on an enemy. I also got some buffs for my hacking during the demo, which added more squares to the grid that dealt extra damage, offering me the choice of a longer hack that does more damage, or skipping those squares so I could open the armor faster.
A chunky astronaut
Hugh has thrusters and a jetpack, but that doesn’t make him nimble or fast. You can dash in combat, but moving through a space, I felt much more like a tank than a speedy soldier, which was refreshing. It almost added a layer of stress to combat, since it was harder to create space between myself and enemies.
Most of the moon space station that I saw during the demo, along with the humanoid robotic enemies and the not-so-human ones, felt extremely futuristic, which gives Pragmata a distinct flavor of sci-fi that I haven’t experienced often in games. Story details during the demo were quite light, so I didn’t get the exact date it was set, but it seemed more near future than I initially expected.
The weapons also felt chunkier, not opting for lasers or other weightless sci-fi weapons. The pistol feels heavy, reminding me of the pistol in Halo CE. The other weapons I found, a net trap and a shotgun, both had extremely limited ammo I could hold, but felt incredibly powerful to use. Only being able to hold a small amount of ammo freed me up to use it, since it felt wasteful to reach an ammo pick up and not be able to collect it since I already had a handful of bullets.
While I need to know more about the story and other mechanics of Pragmata, my short time with the combat made me extremely interested in Capcom’s big sci-fi adventure. Pragmata is set for release in 2026 on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC via Steam.
