One man and his daughter, against a world.
Pragmata is a 3rd person action-adventure game, developed and published by Capcom.
You play as Hugh, an engineer of the Delphi corporation who is sent as part of a team to investigate the loss of communication at The Cradle, a mining and research station on the moon. The station is home to advanced 3D printing technology which can create almost anything with a special type of material that was discovered there, lunafilament.
After a moonquake strikes and you are separated from the rest of your team, you awake to find a young girl helping you. Though she acts and sounds like a child she is actually a pragmata, an advanced android that you decide to call Diana. Shortly after you first meet, the reason for the communication loss is revealed. IDUS, the artificial intelligence that runs the station and its mostly robotic workforce, has gone rogue. Now, needing to reach the comm tower to contact Earth, you set out with Diana and make your way around the station as IDUS sends countless robots to kill you.
Combat is a mix of shooting and puzzle solving. The robot enemies armour is too strong for your weapons to really do much damage, but Diana is capable of hacking them to expose their weak spots. To do this you must solve puzzles in real time while dodging attacks, passing your hack through as many blue open nodes as you can before you reach the primary green node. Damage and the time the robot remains exposed increases with each open node you pass through, and these can be further augmented with yellow hacking nodes that you can find and eventually print for yourself. This can be tricky when facing multiple enemies, especially those with differing attack patterns, but you can continue an interrupted hack on the same robot if you need to dodge or are hit. Diana also has an overdrive mode that she can trigger once the hacking gauge is full, this immobilises and exposes all robots nearby, giving you time to even the odds.
Your main weapon is known as your primary unit, and the first gun you have is a pistol called a grip gun, it is powerful with a slow rate of fire and its ammunition regenerates itself. You can find the faster firing pulse rifle a little later in the game, but I prefer the grip gun as I found the greater accuracy and power of the pistol to be more efficient than the increased ammo and speed of the rifle. The ammo still regenerates for the rifle but at the same speed as the pistol which leaves you feeling a little more vulnerable when you run out.
You have three other weapon units, an attack unit for high damage dealing, a tactical unit for buffing hacking or debuffing enemies while doing some damage, and a defence unit for drawing the enemy’s attention away from you. These all have limited ammo and once the gun is empty you will drop it, but you can find them in various places, usually when you are going to be attacked.
Like the yellow hacking nodes, once you have found a weapon you will be able to unlock the ability to print them in the Shelter, a safe area and your base of operations once you get the station tram working again. Along with weapons and hacking nodes, you can use the printer in the shelter to upgrade your abilities and armour mods with lunafilament that you find in chests and by destroying enemies.
Your suit, primary unit and hacking ability can be upgraded with the firmware updater using upgrade components that you find, these will just increase the stats of these three things like health, defence, weapon damage, ammo capacity and hacking damage.
Other features of the shelter include an information station to view codex entries that you find or unlock for the various enemy types, a training simulator and a wardrobe where you can change the skins for both your armour and Diana. These other features become available as your progress through the game and defeat bosses to gain their access keys. Once you give the key to Cabin, the friendly robot that runs the shelter, you gain the next level of access in the shelter and new features are unlocked. Each access level gained also unlocks one of the four REM replicators for Diana, REM stands for Read Earth Memory and the data for these are found on datapads around the levels. You can give any REM data that you find to Diana as a present as she is interested in learning about Earth.
The relationship between Hugh and Diana grows as the game progresses, like a father and daughter almost and is sweet to see. Diana knows little about Earth and is very inquisitive, she mentions that the scientist that created her did not teach her much about humans, the reason for it and her origins are discovered much later in the game so I don’t want to say too much.
The levels are well designed and feature a set number of collectibles for you to find, if you happen to miss any of them you can always return later, though enemies will have respawned. The levels are split into sectors of the station and each one is different, providing some stunning visuals at times, the game is very pretty generally but some parts you come across you just think “this is worthy of a picture”
Pragmata perfectly blends action, exploration and puzzle solving, while providing lots of snippets of information about the human crew that once worked at the station, enhancing an already great story and making the world feel more lived in.
