In recent years, generative AI has led a near-inescapable march through every facet of our daily lives. Whether you’re seeking service, information, production, entertainment, or even counseling, the tool has made its ghoulish presence known in just about every corner you can find, and despite the real-world ramifications its proliferation leaves behind, it’s only gaining more momentum.
In the previous decades before the advent of generative AI, however, the concept of Artificial Intelligence had a somewhat less destructive impact on daily living or the beauty of human expression in fictional storytelling, and instead mainly presented as a device to extoll the themes of playing god or asserting faith in the power of humanity. Enter Yonghee Cho of Nier Automata and Metal Gear Revengence fame, who was brought on by Capcom and their development team to approach a new angle towards AI using the Old El Paso answer to Hard Tacos or Soft Tacos—a story that would focus on both the old Sci-Fi roots of AI, and the current dangers of Generative AI, being navigated by the powers of human connection.
This imaginative effort would steadily evolve into a new IP, Pragmata, and much like the other original release from Capcom, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, the premise places a subtle, yet deceptively deep twist on an accustomed action genre. At the core of its Outré blend of logic puzzles and third-person shooting, Pragmata also manages to tell a surprisingly endearing story about a well-adjusted engineer who stumbles upon an effusive android during a recon mission that goes horribly wrong, and the wholesome bond they build along the way in a world led by AI.
As the pre-credits begin to fade in and out, the scene warm-opens to a response team piloting a rocket ship to the moon to investigate the strange radio silence from the Cradle, the mother plant of Research and Development for their company, Delphi. Not long after their arrival, the facility is suddenly rocked by a “Moon Quake,” sending the scene into chaos, and the team is steadily picked off by the automated personnel running the factory, who have gone dangerously rogue under the orders of a corrupted AI agent. After his Captain saves him from a fatal cave-in, Hugh Williams wakes up to find that he was nursed back to health by an android constructed in the form of a plucky 6-year-old girl who’s unaware of the reason behind the mayhem plaguing the branch on the moon. Despite the fact that she is just as much of an automaton as the killer machines who’re threatening them, the android girl has seemingly maintained her prerogative to assist and aid the humans around her, and pledges to support Hugh with her unique hacking abilities, who accepts, and names her Diana to shepherd the start of their new partnership.
The dynamic between Hugh and Diana is the key hook of Pragmata’s combat, because as handy as Hugh is with a firearm, the hard steel carapace of the murderous bots looming in the area is built to withstand nearly any form of gunfire blasted at them. Diana’s ability to electronically breach their defensive protocols, however, can quickly turn the tide of a firefight by exposing an enemy bot’s weak points outside of their hard metal shell for Hugh to shoot away and destroy. The sequence of hacking and shooting introduces a unique balancing act where players will have to multitask the process of hacking cyber foes in real-time with Diana while shooting and evading the opposition and surrounding hazards with Hugh. As complex as this setup may sound, the implementation and control behind the process is seamlessly intuitive. Utilizing an over-the-shoulder perspective, as soon as players aim their reticle over an enemy with Hugh, a grid-based slide tile puzzle will be presented alongside them to represent the “hacking” process for Diana. Players will navigate their cursor on the grid-board of the tile puzzle through a four-way movement system where inputs are assigned to the main face buttons in the controller, utilizing their respective arrangement for the direction of movement (i.e. △/Y/X will move the cursor up, O/B/A will move the cursor right, etc., etc.).) The goal of the tile puzzle is for players to navigate their cursor through the grid-board from a point A to a point B, often by optimizing their path to the goal through power-up tiles that will enhance the hacking effects on the targeted enemy, and avoiding hazardous tiles that could hamper or outright disrupt the hacking process altogether.
As players scramble to complete the hacking mini-game on screen, they’ll also need to defensively maneuver Hugh around enemy assault with the left stick. Occasionally, they must perform a dodge-thrust with the right-shoulder button. All the while, players must maintain their aim over the enemy with the left-shoulder trigger until the hack is a success. This opens up the mechanical baddie for players to shift to the offensive and fire away at their attacker until the coast is clear. The hacking isn’t just limited to enemy encounters as players will navigate Hugh and Diana through various stage obstacles that will demand precision platforming with Hugh’s enhanced jumping and jet thrusters in sequence with Diana’s hacking techniques in order to affect various elements of the environment for successful traversal. As players delve deeper towards dismantling IDUS, the AI terrorizing the facility, they’ll also come across a resource known as “Lunafilament” or Lim, as it’s shortened to (more on that later), that can be used to enhance Hugh and Diana in multiple ways. The collectible is used as currency to purchase several upgrades to facets like Hugh’s Health bar, Diana’s Hacking prowess, and Hugh’s shooting power, along with the multitude of weapons, tools, and enhanced abilities that players can acquire to conquer each stage of the Cradle. Gathering Lim is as easy as picking it off the ground in the various environments you’ll travel through, or scavenging it directly from defeated bots outright, where players will get numerous chances to spend the valuable material through several different checkpoints that are strewn throughout each stage. Even though the game’s progression system is extensively deep with its sundry of options, the grind to grow Hugh and Diana’s combat potential doesn’t feel arduous by any stretch of the imagination. The flexibility of the game’s progression setup is thanks in large part to the number of checkpoints permeating the stages and the pacing between them; along with the reasonable cost of the resources in between, amounting to values that feel like they can be accumulated from organic play time. Although the overall scheme may seem dense on paper, the setup behind the game’s frenetic “run'n hack then shoot” gameplay feels effectively natural.
In fact, as innovative as Pragmata is with its juxtaposition of puzzle mechanics and third-person shooting, the execution of the ebb and flow behind its character action system feels oddly quaint, hearkening back to the exploratory days of early High-Definition gaming on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, focusing the moment-to-moment gameplay on the strength of its shooting mechanics instead of primarily investing into the spectacle and pageantry of its story and premise. Well, at least not to the intrusive degree that the current climate of modern gaming has been wont to do—no, the narrative of Pragmata and the burgeoning friendship between its star duo and the world-building circumstances that encompass their adventure is what really makes its unique take on an admittedly familiar playing experience feel so evergreen.
This crux to this lies in Diana herself, for as advanced as her sentience and capabilities are, her mentality and naiveté is also designed within the conceit of a 6-year-old girl. Despite the depth of her understanding of the fundamental pillars of knowledge like math, science, or logic, she only possesses a cursory understanding of the real world and the customs of the human population occupying it, leading to some educational moments with Hugh that are genuinely wholesome, the further you shoot and clamber your way through Delphi’s Moon facility. The parental dynamic between a father-like figure and their young cohort isn’t new territory by any stretch of the imagination, with games like The Last of Us and God of War setting some precedent for the sort of emotional baggage that comes with these two types of figures trying to overcome a shared crisis. What makes Pragmata different, however, is that it delivers this dynamic with a new, more refreshing take on the established perspective. Despite the current trauma of losing his colleagues in an unexpected disaster on the job, Hugh handles the situation with a sense of poise that’s professional, yet still relatable to the situation on hand, and applies that sort of grace to his interactions with Diana. The growth from their reluctant alliance to a deep bond is organically told through Hugh’s kind and frankly, emotionally stable demeanor as an adult man who has found themselves tasked with the care of a child-like entity. Without divulging too much, there are numerous points where Hugh relates Diana’s isolation and lack of guidance from a presumed guardian to his own experience at her designated age, where he grew up as an orphan who had the privilege of being adopted by a family in his formative years of childhood instead of his infancy. There are so many instances where Pragmata showcases these heartwarming moments between the two characters while still carefully 
teetering the sense of uncanny valley Diana undeniably conveys, despite possessing a sentience that’s believable enough to achieve the peak of personification. This aspect also leans into the other major recurring theme of the game in its portrayal of the AI-driven technology that rules its world, and the message manages to be emphatically poignant. Instead of the ham-fisted methods used in similar “human vs machine” dilemmas, Pragmata explores the same sort of talking points that we now as a people are still struggling to reckon with, and the degree that the modern society of Pragmata’s world rely on their technology to live.
The big reason behind the Delphi Corporation having its main R&D base on the Moon stems from their need to mine the Moon’s rock material itself in order to produce Lunafilament, the resource that was mentioned earlier, which is the core ingredient behind their space-age-ass 3D printing tech that makes nearly every product they use, from shelters and automobiles, to luxury items, and weapons even. All of the constructions to these items are regulated through, you guessed it, quote-unquote “advanced” AI scripts. The commentary is surprisingly more subtle than you’d imagine, especially when one of the gameplay stages of the moon-based takes place within a self-contained approximation of New York City that was built out of the AI-fueled 3D printing tech, and the hilarious imperfections generated out of its total lack of foundational reinforcement and oversight from something like an AI script. The capitalistic greed of Delphi’s production and the effects it has on both the workers it employs and the consumers they serve, again, is a story of corporate dissonance and late-stage capitalism that’s unsettlingly evocative to the reality of modern-day living with AI without feeling like some hacky spin on tired stories like Blade Runner.
In terms of presentation, Pragmata pushes Capcom’s internal RE Engine to the brink with intensive ray tracing and texturing that accentuate the bombastic movements of the robots and technology inhabiting the lunar space station to an immaculate degree. These effects are especially present in details like Diana’s hair, where each strand appears to be individually rendered and flows with an accurate and natural-looking appearance of long blonde hair being jolted in any which direction during gameplay. Surprisingly, the only time the graphics appear to significantly suffer are during the pre-rendered cut scenes that aren’t played in real-time, as they rolled on screen with awful compression artifacts and bit-crushed pixelation that play out like a 2007 YouTube Video being upscaled to 4K resolution. While there are only a handful of these instances in the game, the stark shift from the lush visuals real-time visuals to the garbled mess of these pre-rendered movies will immediately break any sense of immersion you had with the action on screen. The soundtrack is admittedly not as impressive, but still serviceable to the tone and experience of the setting of Pragmata, interspersing between energetic electronica and somber sonatas led by intricate piano notes, which is something that’s especially prevalent in one of the game’s main themes, "Memories Are You" by the singer, YU-KA. In all, the composition doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it certainly keeps up with the tone and delivers some bops that complement the gameplay well, even if there aren’t any memorable tunes to take away after the game is turned off.
Pragmata is one of those unusual instances where Capcom has delivered a brand new property that manages to offer a delightfully fresh, yet comfortably acquainted action-packed experiences, built with a well’s depth of character and charm, and rich with potential for new adventures with Hugh and Diana. Yeah, I know I really fueled the fire of Pragmata being a guerilla Mega Man return (and their cheeky-ass Easter eggs certainly didn’t help diffuse the speculation), but honestly, this game is good enough to stand on its own merit, and is a must-play title that everyone should check out.