Capcom’s upcoming third-person shooter Pragmata just revealed its release date at the 2025 Game Awards, and alongside this reveal comes a free “sketchbook” demo for PC players. In this short but sweet experience, we get to take a look at Pragmata’s combat, hacking mechanics, gorgeous visuals, and more.
Pragmata puts us in the shoes of Hugh Williams, an astronaut stranded in a lunar research station alongside the young android Diana. The demo places us at an unknown point in the story, where we have to restore power to the station while its cyborg workers go haywire, leading up to a boss fight against a giant robot. The demo clocks in at around 15 minutes in length but gives us a bit of worldbuilding through hidden notes, a good look at the game’s combat, and a decent understanding of most of its main systems.
The Big Guns
Hugh’s arsenal in the demo consists of his grip gun, a six-shot pistol with infinite ammo, a shockwave gun, which deals massive damage at close range, and the stasis net, which temporarily stuns enemies inside a small area. Aside from the grip gun, every other weapon is found through exploration and has a limited amount of ammo, being categorized as red for damage or green for utility, with the player only being able to carry one gun of each type. Hugh has four weapon slots available, and although nothing in the demo takes up the fourth slot, it’s safe to theorize that it will most likely be a heavier, possibly explosive weapon.
Hugh’s weapons don’t do a lot of damage on their own, making Diana’s hacking a very important part of Pragmata’s core gameplay loop. The player controls Diana by navigating through a grid with the face buttons, which, when done correctly, exposes an enemy’s weak spot. Diana’s grid can also hold special consumable nodes with unique effects, like further lowering an enemy’s defense, although these have a limited number of activations.
Two Characters at Once
Pragmata’s gunplay and combat are so far very satisfying, as Hugh’s weapons pack quite a punch when you are properly exploiting an enemy’s weakness. The shockwave gun is especially satisfying to use, usually killing the smaller enemies instantly as massive sparks fly around. The game also features some light platforming, with Hugh’s regular movement being just slow enough to sell you on the weight of his astronaut suit without sacrificing movement fluidity. This is something Capcom has accomplished before with Exoprimal, and I still don’t understand how they manage to make characters that are agile but somehow look heavy, although I love to see it.
Juggling hacking enemies with Diana as you try to exploit critical hits and dodge enemies with Hugh is definitely the fun kind of multitasking, and while the game only gives us one big arena fight, I expect that Pragmata will have some crazy encounters and boss fights where the player will need to do a lot at once to stay alive. The game is far from unmanageable right now, but I definitely expect harder content to be present in the full game, especially since the demo only features easy and standard difficulties.
Pragmata Demo Closing Thoughts
According to Capcom, the Pragmata demo has arrived earlier on PC for the sake of collecting optimization data, and that effort definitely shows through how the game looks and runs. Pragmata’s environments so far look incredibly clean, and for once, ray tracing doesn’t feel like a massive compromise when it comes to performance, as the game runs great and has a plethora of graphical options for you to perfectly tweak your experience.
Despite being short, Pragmata’s demo still features some of Capcom’s flourishes, like Diana presenting different drawings on the result screen depending on your performance, giving it some replayability for completionists. Clearing the demo once also unlocks some goodies, like a perfect dodge mechanic, a charge rifle weapon, a new hacking node, which allows you to hack multiple enemies at once, and a variant of Hugh’s default suit filled with Diana’s scribbles. Pragmata’s demo gets an A+ from me. This is definitely a game to be excited about with the new year practically here, and I can’t wait to see what the game will bring both visually and mechanically once it comes out.
