Back when the PS4 and Xbox One were preparing for launch, Capcom showcased Deep Down, a game set in the future that transported players back to medieval fights from the past. That game never released, and for a while, it looked like sci-fi shooter Pragmata was destined for the same fate.
It has been stuck in development hell for almost five years now, with barely any clarity on what the game is, since its mysterious and bizarre reveal trailer at the PS5 Showcase in June 2020. Now, in 2025, Pragmata is finally emerging from the shadows of deep space, and we went hands-on with this upcoming space game ahead of Gamescom 2025.
Pragmata is a strange game to try and describe, but we’ll do our best to convey how its many parts come together to create something addictive and fascinating. It’s part ‘Dead Space’, part ‘Resident Evil’, and part ‘The Last of Us’. But probably the wildest thing about it is that the entire hook of its combat is borrowed from ‘Snake’.
My Robot Friend
You play as Hugh Williams, a spaceman who gets separated from his team suddenly and ends up stuck on a space station that is on the fritz. There, he meets a girl whom he calls Diana. She is an Android created using Lunafillament, a resource that can replicate anything or anyone with its DNA.
They join forces to use Hugh’s combat abilities and Diana’s android hacking powers to investigate the space station and find out just what caused it to go haywire.
While that set-up and the relationship between these two doesn’t exactly feel novel, we did get hints that both Hugh and Diana actually like each other and want to work together from the get-go.
The section we played seems like it was from the early game, and it didn’t feel similar to Joel and Ellie or Booker and Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite’s relationship at all. The relationship isn’t beginning on a negative note, where they begrudgingly help each other, and this made the game’s characters feel surprisingly refreshing, and reflects how they work together in combat.
We didn’t get much of an idea of the overall story, but the game is pulling on the same haunting and mysterious threads of Dead Space as you explore this giant ship and come across environmental puzzles to solve and androids to blast.
Snake? Snake!? Snaaaaake!!
Pragmata is a bonkers game to try and describe, because it’s a very “you have to play it to get it” kind of game. Hearing the “simultaneous shooting and hacking” elevator pitch, we thought there was no way its systems would work together well, but… it just does.
At its core, Pragmata feels like a classic Resident Evil or Dead Space game. You are patrolling corridors and hallways, shooting androids that slowly stumble towards you or taking on bosses that have lumbering, deliberate attacks. The twist is that Hugh’s weapons do very little damage on their own — you need to utilise Diana’s hacking powers, while avoiding enemies, to hack foes and weaken them.
This is done by starting a hack on an enemy and using Diana to play a Snake-like minigame on the side of the screen, where you have to pass through certain nodes on a 5×5 grid to reach a goal. At least on a controller, this game is bound to the face buttons, while Hugh’s controls, like shooting and aiming, are on the triggers.
Upon reaching the goal, the enemy you were hacking will be stunned or weakened, allowing Hugh to do significantly more damage with his weapons. We are talking four or five times the damage. Guns feel like peashooters before this, which means Diana’s hacking mechanic is integral to the gameplay, not optional.
Hacking is effectively the “stun-bar” mechanic we have seen in most action games in recent years, like the recent God of War games. But it feels truly innovative to give this its own mechanic rather than simply making it an extra feature of the traditional combat.
This hacking happens in real-time, too, while enemies are walking towards you or attacking you, creating this fascinating and initially demanding combat flow that requires you to keep one eye on the enemy’s movements and another on the grid to solve the puzzle. It’s a lot to take in at the start, but it’s incredible how quickly your brain adjusts and learns how to manage both of these two halves of the combat at the same time. The whole thing is deeply addictive, and by the end of the demo, I was able to memorize the face button presses of where I wanted to go while looking at the other side of the screen. “Right two, down one, left three, up one,” etc.
Because combat has this extra half beyond “point gun and shoot”, you are constantly being rewarded with the completion of something or feeling like you are landing mini victories in every fight. It’s an incredible reward cycle that forms the backbone of the game.
The path forwards
Watch On
While impressed by what we saw, there are a lot of questions surrounding Pragmata, and the success of it will depend on how much the mechanics, combat, and systems develop.
We did see glimpses of how the hacking and combat will develop as you go on, alongside new weapons and tools for Hugh. Towards the end of the demo, we picked up a buff that weakened enemy resistances even more after hacking. These buffs have a limited number of uses, and during each hacking attempt, they appear in the hacking grid, and you can opt to pass through them on your way to the goal to gain the buff.
This allows for a lot of possibilities to further deepen the hacking mechanic with more complex hacking grids, expanding it, or trying to decide which nodes will be of benefit in a fight. It’s got a lot of potential, and it all depends on whether Capcom makes the most of what it has here.
The same goes for environments and enemy variety. We only saw a couple of enemy types in the demo, and the environment was all pasty white spaceship walls. While the atmosphere and lore presented in those environments were quite riveting, especially considering the brief glimpse we got, the game will need to shake things up as it continues to keep the same level of intrigue that there is early on.
Despite that, after five years stuck in development, there was every chance Pragmata would feel bland, outdated, or unambitious. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Instead, it is setting itself up to be one of the most fascinating sci-fi games in a long, long time, and impressively innovative in a way most publishers would deem “risky”.
Capcom has built its current success and reputation on rethinking old genres and redefining classic franchises, and Pragmata is just the next step on that journey.
Pragmata is scheduled to release in 2026 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.