Pragmata

Pragmata captured my attention way back in *checks notes* 2020 (wow). I finally played Pragmata earlier this year at Gamescom and walked away both thoroughly impressed and annoyed with Capcom for making my demo only 20 minutes long. Following a new trailer at The Game Awards 2025, which showed off new gameplay in a New York City-like simulation on the moon, Capcom released a demo for the game; it’s basically what I played earlier this year, and I can’t recommend it enough. It quickly highlights how unique Pragmata’s gameplay is, which mixes third-person gunplay with real-time hacking minigames.

“From the start, the core vision was a buddy-action experience where you would control two distinct characters with a single controller,” Pragmata director Yongchee Cho tells me. The team explored giving protagonist Hugh a small drone that aids him in combat, but once it landed on android Diana as a second protagonist, this idea evolved into the hacking system. This created various layers of gameplay that all happen at once, and when coupled with the mysterious narrative and various locales warped and twisted by Luna Filament, the name Pragmata makes a lot of sense.