Pragmata is a game that takes some very big swings. I’d hesitate to call it Capcom’s most ambitious title, but it’s certainly among the top of the company’s ambitious ventures, and by far the one with the highest production values. It’s a game that marries tender moments of care and appreciation with fast-paced, multi-layered action combat and exploration, and against all odds it sticks the landing — albeit with a few minor stumbles.

Set in the seemingly far future, Pragmata has players stepping into the heavy shoes of Hugh, an interplanetary handyman of sorts tasked with investigating the lack of recent communication from a settlement on the moon. Upon arriving, a vicious moonquake strikes, killing all of Hugh’s teammates and sending the facility’s AI programs into overdrive to try and protect the capitalist interests housed within. 

It also wakes up a small, child-shaped robot that Hugh dubs Diana. Diana is a Pragmata (hey, that’s the name of the game), a hyper-advanced AI-powered robot that has a great deal of technical knowledge but hasn’t interacted with people all that much. Because of this, she has the emotional capacity of a young child, matching her exterior, and Hugh takes a liking to her, offering to bring her along as he continues to investigate the increasingly weird goings-on on the moon. 

Hugh and Diana’s relationship forms the emotional core of Pragmata’s story. Diana is a young, fresh mind, learning about humanity for the first time, and Hugh is a hardened, cynical man in his 40s who never married or had kids. Sure, he works with a crew on various jobs he completes, but he’s mostly a loner. Working alongside Diana makes Hugh confront his loner status in some respects. He grieves the loss of his crewmates – his friends – and he starts to look outside of his own worldview. He teaches Diana about Earth and how people work, unpacking and processing his own life in the process. 

It’s a lovely dynamic between the two — Hugh acts somewhat as a fatherly figure to Diana, but he’s more like a trusted teacher to her. And like any good story with a teacher, his student ends up teaching him plenty in return. Sure, it’s a bit tropey, and at times it leans very hard into those tropes, but it’s very sweet to watch unfold. Hugh is genuinely proud when Diana learns, accepts, and applies knowledge, and Diana deeply cares for and appreciates Hugh’s guidance. There are small, touching moments throughout that make the entire experience worth it. 

That said, it does feel like Pragmata is a little unwilling to explore its setting. This is a far future settlement on the moon with advanced 3D printing technology that can make anything and everything, bankrolled by a venture capitalist firm with very obviously shady long-term goals. There’s the implication that Earth is in a bit of a tight spot, and destructive AI is running rampant. There are obvious parallels to be made between this messed up future and the path humanity is currently on in the real world, but Pragmata has no interest in exploring those parallels. They come up in tiny bits and pieces from time to time, and are hidden away in collectible text logs scattered throughout the game, but there’s little in the way of exploring them meaningfully in the game’s main story. 

In a way, that’s perfectly fine. The relationship between Hugh and Diana is more than enough to carry the story through its 15-hour runtime, with a few twists and turns to shake things up thrown in for good measure. It’s not bad by any stretch of the imagination, and it rarely feels lacking. It just feels like a missed opportunity from a studio that usually ties together its threads exceptionally well.

Pragmata’s gameplay is what makes it such an ambitious game. Traversing through the world isn’t all that special – it’s a fairly straightforward third-person exploration game with some light environmental puzzling – but its combat, that’s the secret sauce that makes Pragmata so special. 

The combat in Pragmata has its first layer like many other over-the-shoulder third-person shooters – you point one of many different weapons at an enemy and pull the trigger to shoot – but it’s what’s layered on top that makes it so unique and magical. When you point your weapon at an enemy, all of which are robots, Diana starts to hack that enemy. You’re presented with a grid board that you can traverse an icon through, hitting nodes that affect the enemy in some way, like making it take more damage or freezing it in place. Once you complete a hack, the enemy “opens up,” exposing its electronics and letting you deal more damage. 

All of this happens in real time as you face off against enemies. In any given encounter, you’ll be aiming, shooting, hacking, traversing the environment, and strategising all at once. It’s a lot to process at first, but when it all clicks into place it feels incredible. With more options and upgrades unlocked as you progress, combat becomes this delicate dance of hacking while moving, moving while shooting, shooting while hacking, and strategising on the fly. It makes every encounter thrilling, to say the least, and the combat gameplay itself never wears out its welcome. 

Unfortunately, while the combat design is phenomenal, the game’s difficulty balancing is a bit of a mess. I found bosses to be an absolute breeze, with plenty of room to move around, dodge attacks, and strategise. The real challenge comes from random hallways or small, locked arenas, where if you get stuck facing off against two or more enemies, it’s a tough-as-nails fight for survival, let alone success. Juggling multiple enemies’ hacking sequences, dodging their attacks, and trying to micromanage it all while maintaining your health and positioning is exhausting, and feels much more difficult than any boss in the game. 

It becomes especially frustrating in the back half of the game, when enemies start soaking tremendous amounts of damage. I can deal with the occasional damage sponge in a game, especially if it’s a boss, but if every random enemy takes a few minutes to kill, and you have to kill a dozen just to progress, the experience starts to wear a little bit thin. It’s not helped by a particular enemy in the late game that is practically invisible at the start of encounters and is capable of grabbing onto Hugh and forcing Diana to rapidly solve a hacking puzzle with far too short a counter. This problem doesn’t ease up when playing on the game’s easier difficulty, either, and there are few accessibility or approachability options, so if you want to play you just have to struggle through it. The optional in-game “training challenges” are even more intense, but at least those are optional. 

As far as the Switch 2 port is concerned, it’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s certainly not all bad, either. It’s a very good-looking game while docked – yet another Switch 2 game that feels weird to play on a tiny handheld because of how good it looks – and still decent-looking, though notably worse, while handheld. It’s far from unplayable, and certainly better than triple-A games that made the jump to the original Switch, but there’s no doubt that this is a game that’s pushing the Switch 2’s hardware to its limits. 

You can see this in the performance, too, which is inconsistent at best. Pragmata aims for 60fps but doesn’t really get there most of the time. I haven’t analysed the frame rate with proper tools, but analysis for the game’s demo showed it running in the 40s and 50s most of the time while docked, which feels about right in the full game, too. I think it would benefit massively from an option to cap the frame rate to 30 or 40fps, because the unlocked, inconsistent frame rate is noticeable and can lead to a little bit of motion sickness. 

Still, despite these performance drawbacks, it’s easy to lose yourself in the game and forget that it’s even a problem. It’s got very strong art direction, thoughtful sound and music direction, and fantastic vocal performances in both English and Japanese. Pragmata may be better on other consoles, but it’s still damn good on Switch 2. 

Pragmata is a wonderfully ambitious game that marries thoughtful, touching storytelling with some of the weirdest and most satisfying combat gameplay in recent history. It’s not without its stumbles, particularly when it comes to its difficulty scaling and performance on Switch 2, but all of those blemishes largely fade away when you step back and look at the game as a whole. And as a whole, it’s simply delightful. 

Rating: 4/5