Pragmata’s unique action and puzzle blend may grab the headlines – but as its creators explain, its secret sauce is all about rhythm

It’s quite rare that we deign to give a game multiple bites at the preview apple here on Eurogamer, especially over such a short period. But Pragmata is an interesting case. Each time Capcom has presented it, the publisher has teased a small glimpse of what the game might be – meagre but enticing at the same time. Back in the summer, we saw its unique mixture of hacking and shooting presented in a very stripped-back demo. A few months later, we saw a tiny bit more – but no matter how intriguing, it still felt like more concept demo than game.

Now, though, I finally understand what Pragmata is. My third time playing it at last presents a vision of a full game, the title’s elusive ‘gameplay loop’ exposed. Also laid bare in this latest hands-on is the true nature of the game, which itself feels a far cry from the curated demos I experienced previously.

Here’s the rub, I think: Pragmata seems like it’s going to be fairly challenging. The content I play is actually the same area from which the other demos have been derived, but this time I experience something which is much closer to the final intent (but, Capcom stresses, is still non-final). There are more enemies, they are stronger, and the player has less time to breathe. In a few places it’s actually pretty brutal.

What quickly becomes apparent is that the previous demos were tuned to do one thing only: sell Capcom’s concept of the hack-and-shoot gameplay of Pragmata. If you missed our previous natterings, the short summary is that most enemies in the game are initially nigh impervious to protagonist Hugh’s gunfire. Thankfully, he has android girl Diana on his back. When you squeeze the left trigger to aim at enemies, instead of pulling the right trigger to fire you can instead use the face buttons to solve small sliding block puzzles to hack enemies.

Once breached, enemies become more vulnerable to gunfire and also often are slowed down. In the other demos this was cute – in the more final presentation, we have a game of the sort that has the ability trigger a little bead of sweat on your brow as you duck, dive, and try to manage distances, space, dodge attacks, hack, and shoot multiple enemies in the tight quarters of Pragmata’s claustrophobic space station setting.

“You have the hacking, the thrusters, and the shooting. You’re going to be working through these elements,” explains Pragmata director Cho Yonghee.

He draws out an invisible triangle on the table between us, a representation of the three core tenants of Pragmata’s gameplay. His hand bounces between the three extremes of that triangle as he murmurs “don, don, don, don” – a Japanese onomatopoeia akin to the rhythmic thud of a drum. I’ve seen this exact verbalization of the rhythm of gameplay in countless Japanese interviews before, but I think Pragmata might be the game where that pulsing example feels most appropriate.

“You’re gonna be hacking the enemies, and then you’re gonna be using the thruster to get out of the way, and then you’re gonna be shooting the enemies,” Yonghee continues, at a rolling speed which is evocative of that which the player much react and flip between the various modes of thinking in-game. “The pacing increases as you get used to it, and as you get used to it more elements get added. So it’s not only these three things… it builds up towards this full game experience.”

While it’s clear there hasn’t been any intention to set out to make some sort of Soulsian mega-difficult game, Pragmata’s team is clearly acutely aware that they have made something quite unlike much else on the market. I expect it is going to be a ‘Marmite game’, and a cult hit – the sort of thing that those who ‘get it’ will adore and those who don’t will abhor. That whiplash-inducing back-and-forth between shooting, hacking, and exerting battlefield control through thruster dashes and enemy-slowing gadgets will either click for you or it won’t. But there’s been clear thought in trying to increase that accessibility, which is where Pragmata’s inexorable rhythm spreads to the rest of the game.

Enter the Shelter. I had thought Pragmata might be a straight-up stage-based game – but instead of a linear A-B-C thread, the game instead features a safe ‘hub zone’ from which Hugh and Diana are dispatched to the rest of the lunar station. It’s wheel-and-spoke design; the Shelter is the wheel’s centre, while each of its stages is a spoke you can visit and explore, with the protagonist pair taking a tram to and from stages.

“We didn’t want to have a game that’s just a game where you go from A to B, and you finish that game with one playthrough. We want to have a game where you can go back and forth,” says Yonghee. While you can ‘critical path’ the game and “steamroll it” if you so desire, that’s not really the intended design – the intent is that you’ll bounce back and forth between various stages and the Shelter in a not-necessarily-linear manner.

This is quietly incentivized. In the tram menu where you select which stage you want to travel to there’s completion percentages, and you’ll probably want to hoover up the majority of what a stage has to offer, for the game’s currencies and unlocks become important to forming a playstyle.

As well as the gameplay loop and overall difficulty, another thing the previous Pragmata media beats had bafflingly hidden was how much there is to the experience. I’d genuinely low-key feared it might only have three or four different weapons in total, but in reality it turns out there’s rather a lot of them. There’s a range of weapons that can be upgraded, and so too can things like Hugh’s suit, Diana’s hacking, and a range of abilities. There’s also attachments. Basically, there’s a lot of stuff to consider and quite a bit of flexibility in character building – which is both a manner to make that frantic gameplay easier to manage by building a setup more suitable for you, and also an incentive to replay stages, collect everything available, and experiment.

“We have all these weapons, and we have this ability for people to customize their arsenal, to customise their loadouts to what they want to do,” Yonghee continues.

“We want to have a game where you can go back and forth, and you try different weapons. But also then once they’ve felt like they tried it out, to then go back to the shelter and try something new. Go back, upgrade, change the weapons around, change the nodes around, and then try to take the difficult enemies down again.

“The idea behind it is to have at least enough that you can upgrade several different weapons at least. We want you to have the opportunity to switch around, but also then focus on one type and then pivot to focus on another type if you want that as well.”

“You have this cycle where you go out, you take on enemies, you come back, you get stronger, and then you’ll be able to defeat that enemy that took you down,” adds producer Naoto Oyama. “It goes back and forth.”

So crucial is this to Pragmata’s design that you can actually quit and head back to the shelter part-way through a level. Anywhere that there is a respawn point, which has to be unlocked via a quick hack from Diana, you can then interact and zip back to base quickly to think about an upgrade.

There’s a lot going on here. In classic Japanese fashion, one can sense that Pragmata’s creators are reluctant to have the names of other games in their mouths. That’s common enough. But the similarities I can see are positive ones. The structure of returning to a safe house periodically evokes a lot of games, but the back-and-forth structure when combined with an experimental Capcom puts me vaguely in mind of Dead Rising. When you’re out on a mission, with hulking enemies clomping towards you, shooting at their kneecaps to slow them down and create space, looking at Hugh in his space suit.. Well, another Dead comes to mind, Dead Space. These are good comparisons to have laid at your door.

At the same time, Pragmata is nothing like these games because it so hinges on that fascinating core concept. It’s a risky idea, and one that easily risks confounding some players – thus the ginger roll-out of the game’s full features. One thing both director and producer are keen to emphasize is the amount of thought put into balancing that experience out.

“The balance is one of the main challenges that we had from the beginning of development,” admits Yonghee. “Having something that perhaps works in a smaller or shorter part of the game might not work as well in the full game, so that was something that we focused on getting right for the full game.”

“As you progress naturally, it gets trickier, of course. But just having the difficulty rise might not be something that people would be satisfied with, it might not be enough. So on top of the difficulty rising, you also have new elements, new abilities, new weapons added. And once you’ve got used to that, then another thing comes in. So you’re learning, you’re building on that, as the difficulty is rising. On top of that, you’re learning and getting used to the gameplay itself. The characters are getting stronger, they’re getting new stuff – but also you, the player, is getting stronger.

“We’re heavily balancing it so that you get these new additional items once you get used to these key core elements,” adds Oyama. “It’s not something you’ll get overwhelmed with gameplay wise. But once players are warmed up to these elements, we can then hit them with something new, something exciting.”

The result is a fascinating mix that was only better in its more difficult and more thought-provoking proper hands-on than it was in the two previous proof-of-concept style demos. Seeing the full ‘loop’ of Pragmata laid bare has cemented its place in my list of most anticipated games for 2026.

One thing the game isn’t, however, is a back-door-pilot for a return of another of Capcom’s heroes. Diana’s poses in key art, her status as an android, and her bright blue puffer jacket has the internet conspiracy theorists up in arms. When I bring it up, the director and producer both laugh and grimace at once.

“I’ve seen all the conspiracy theories,” laughs Oyama, as his colleague leans forwards in his seat, miming the act of frantically scrolling social media and internet forums filled with speculation that Pragmata is actually a secret reboot. “It was very unexpected for us,” admits the producer.

“It’s nice, it’s fun,” laughs Yonghee. “I’m a Mega Man fan as well. It is fun to see. But… please,” he pleads, “it is not Mega Man.”

Pragmata is slated for release on PC, Xbox Series X/S and PS5 at some point in 2026.