Even after recently playing about two hours of Pragmata at Capcom’s office in San Francisco last week, I think the game is a little hard to explain. It’s a sci-fi third-person action game, but you play as two characters. You explore a mysterious lunar research station as a big man named Hugh who wears a bulky space suit and shoots aggressive robots. To give those robots any meaningful damage, you need to hack them as an android (technically, a “Pragmata”) that Hugh names Diana, who stands on his back and takes the form of a blonde-haired human child. Hacking the robots involves highlighting tiles on a grid in the right order as Diana in a minigame that reminds me of Pipe Dream. And while you’re hacking, the robots move in on you, sometimes in oppressive, suffocating groups.
Many of the enemies, despite being robots instead of classic Resident Evil zombies, have a chilling presence. The most common ones I faced were tall, humanlike robots called Walkers, and they sometimes staggered forward or occasionally bent into grotesque shapes after I hacked them. Once, I actually jumped when a Walker camouflaged itself among a lineup of mannequins. Another, different enemy was pure nightmare fuel: It had a huge human head and would run at me like a giant toddler, but sometimes, it would pull back the front of its head to reveal a red laser saw and then rush at me on all fours.
They made me feel uneasy — which was intentional. The idea around their design, Pragmata director Yonghee Cho tells The Verge, is that perhaps these robots were designed by AI, not humans. “So, like the AI you see in real life where it makes you wonder, ‘Why did the AI create it like this?’ you are also wondering for the enemies in Pragmata, ‘Why did AI create it like this?’” he explains.
That feeling of AI-induced strangeness doesn’t just show up in the enemies. The level I explored in my demo was a strange re-creation of a city like New York: The main area in the level had bright signs, screens, and lights like Times Square. But at the same time, it’s also not an accurate version. In the lore of the game, an AI supposedly created the space, and the Pragmata team looked at early generative AI videos, where things didn’t quite match up, as a reference. “All of that is made by humans to look like an AI has 3D printed something wrong,” producer Naoto Oyama says. “But it’s all human-made errors to make it look like AI.” (No generative AI was used in the creation of Pragmata, according to Cho and Oyama.)
The Pragmata development team also has a lot of experience working on Resident Evil and other Capcom series like Devil May Cry, and they’ve drawn on that experience while creating the game, Cho says. (Cho himself worked on Resident Evil 7 and the remake of Resident Evil 3.) I really felt that legacy, especially playing the Pragmata demo just a couple weeks after completing Resident Evil Requiem. Sometimes, when aiming for headshots on the Walkers with Pragmata’s version of a pistol, I felt like Hugh was a spaceman version of Leon Kennedy.
Even though Pragmata is squarely an action game, it feels like it brings elements of the Resident Evil survival horror framework to a new franchise, sort of like Capcom did with Dino Crisis in the PS1 era. It’s a strange game, but also familiar in ways that make Pragmata feel distinctly Capcom.