We had a chance to get our hands on the long-promised and nearly ready Pragmata back at Summer Game Fest’s Play Days last year. And given the release confirmation for April 2026 had come only a few months later at The Game Awards in December, it felt wonderfully fully formed. There wasn’t a large demo to mess with at that point, but what was there was a fascinating combination of mini puzzles and action-adventure fighting. We were thrilled to go one more round with the game at a private media event prior to the proper release on April 17, 2026. Many have long been excited to finally see this game realized, and they will not be disappointed.
The game centers on the pairing of human spacefarer Hugh Williams and the precocious android modeled to look like a female child, Diana. Through the portions of the game we played Hugh stays in a weaponized spacesuit that obscures his face (similar to the title character of The Mandalorian) and Diana wears an extremely large blue space jacket. Most of the time Diana rides on Hugh’s back as they traverse the world of this seemingly abandoned lunar space station. We’ve not seen the full background on the story’s intro in our demos, but Hugh is alone after some kind of largescale mishap. After meeting Diana and they start to try to find a way back to Earth, the duo comes across numerous synthezoids/robots/cyborgs of various creepy dimensions hellbent on murdering anything they meet.
While the game is rendered in a classic third-person over-the-shoulder perspective, the charm of Pragmata is the gearshift gameplay dynamic. The robotic denizens of this world are largely—at a base level—immune to regular small arms fire, but Diana has some form of innate over-the-air (perhaps Bluetooth!) ability to hack into any functional artificial intelligence in her area. The challenge then becomes first targeting an opponent using Diana’s hacking, solving a direction-based mini-puzzle navigating the cursor through certain favorable squares, avoiding unfavorable squares, before arriving at the destination square, then having Hugh light up the foe as quickly as possible. Diana’s hacking lowers the offending robot’s defenses or sometimes completely incapacitates it. The more this is engaged, the better chance Hugh has of being able to demolish them. So the gearshift becomes a time-based, balancing act. You have to be in a certain range with the enemy to be able to engage the hacking, but they also won’t just sit still waiting for you to take them offline. They’re moving towards you, poking, prodding, firing and shooting while you’re trying quickly to navigate a controller subset of rules before shifting back into the traditional movement- and shooting-based button combinations.
It sounds like a lot of stress, but truly, it’s mad fun. We got to tinker heavily with the duo’s load-out area where upgrades are available for Diana’s powers, Hugh’s weapons and their enclave in general (which seems to be mostly for giving Hugh a chance to interact with Diana and get her to open up more). This area serves as a local train station hub but is inhabited by a friendly sentient plasma screen kiosk, a smiling assistant named Cabin System. Hugh’s upgrades center on his armor, weapon strength and his jetpack which allows him to float fall as he navigates the world. Diana, on the other hand, has upgrades that enhance her hacking power, range and number of enemies she can manipulate. Our demo gave us a chance to tinker with these upgrades and to trick out their pad with certain holographic furnishings akin to what a regular family might have on Earth.
From there, it was a new section of the game that we got to explore that the rogue AI had seemingly modeled based on New York City. Imagine a park area from Westworld half built and still being twined together, and that’s about what this felt like: a twisted and almost cybernetically threaded together formulation of a city. Hugh and Diana want to head to a tower at the far end of the boulevard, but IDUS the AI causing all the problems immediately sets a barricade requiring six locks to be unlocked separately. Thus begins the game experience proper, traversing elaborately designed corridors (could perhaps be thought of as mini dungeons) combating synthezoids, enabling switches and generally navigating around the 3D environment. The aforementioned combat experience is massively engaging though interestingly, of the four primary weapons Hugh can use, three of them kind of just get dropped when you run out of ammo. They don’t stay active with 0 shots left, he just drops them right away until you stumble on a new gun to replace it.
The one complaint in this demo preview might be we how had a few moments where while we knew what we needed to do, we kept failing to figure how to get there. On a couple of occasions, the way we needed to go was right next to where we were looking but we just couldn’t find the right corner to take to get there. We would end up back tracking a good portion of the stage incorrectly before finally finding the right path where we were. That’s a small complaint though as otherwise, Pragmata is fluid and freshly engaging. You will find yourself learning how to make Hugh dance around to buy Diana time to hack the throngs of enemies you will face, but the scaling of learning how to master this gearshift and getting good at it becomes richly rewarding. There’s even a God of War/DOOM-esque form of a glory kill where if you traverse just the right hacking path hitting a purple icon Hugh can one-hit terminate the enemy. Predictably so, the voice acting and performance for Diana is adorable as she is relentlessly psyched to be partnering with Hugh on this adventure.
Once we switched all six locks, we moved forward and got to sample a stellar boss battle. Hugh and Diana face down a gigantic, Voltron-level robot at this point, one big enough to rip this Times Square-like cityscape to shreds. This required thinking about five different levels as it was necessary to run, attack, hack, snipe from on high, but most importantly disable defenses that prevented Diana from hacking. The boss adapts to the hacking and starts using onboard antennae to thwart the incoming transition. This was a wild, edge-of-your-seat experience and it took us a couple of steps up to the plate to knock down all of its hit points.
This was but a small piece of the full Pragmata experience, but it was evident even in this modest preview that Pragmata is going to sit amongst the best of AAA Capcom titles in the current generation of video games. This is a lovingly crafted world and gameplay experience that is well worth the wait.
Pragmata comes out on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2 on April 17, 2026.