Topic: Pragmata

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There was definitely a thread, I guess the person who posted it also deactivated their account, which took the thread with it because I now cannot find it. Kinda sucks as I wrote a little review of the game I was quite proud of in that thread and I guess it is now lost.

Edit, found it in my old GDoc Drafts:

I was shocked to see as the credits rolled my save file suggested I beat Pragmata on standard difficulty in just under nine hours. You mean they still make games that aren’t artificially inflated to 40+ hours?! It’s refreshing to see a developer ignore the marketing myth that "longer equals better," which so often actively harms a game's pacing. All jokes aside, I would say Pragmata’s length is just about right. It starts to tip onto the wrong side of frustrating for me right before it ends, however, the short runtime prevents those frustrations from building and lingering to the point of souring the experience

So what even is Pragmata? I would say it is Capcom’s attempt to do the kind of “prestige” gaming experience Sony have kinda made their entire formula for the last decade or so, albeit with a very different tone.

Hugh isn’t a "Sad Dad" looking for absolution through parenthood; there is no trauma debt to pay off here. He’s just a decent guy who needs Diana to survive. They build a friendship and feel like they are equals. Diana and Hugh need each other, but for different reasons, which is how they are able to create that feeling of an equal power balance, when clearly one of them holds more power than the other. While it may be possible to position it that Hugh is only using Diana, I feel like their origins of a somewhat mechanical bond (pun not intended) grows into something much warmer, and puts any of that narrative awkwardness to bed with it. Which is important, given what we learn about Diana across the experience, and is one of the many examples of the deftness of craft on display in this game. However, maybe it is because the general melancholia of a Sony first party is largely removed, I also found that this game never quite hit the emotional highs of Sony’s best. It is a serviceable story, and I liked Hugh and Diana, and that is about it.

Mechanically, the game’s “play both protagonists at the same time” gimmick feels extremely overwhelming early on. However, the game is carefully tuned and grows in a satisfyingly organic way with the player. The systems begin to open out and simultaneously deepen, all the while in lockstep with the player’s own mastery of wrangling the initially alien feeling mechanics. It creates a rewarding sense of meta progression beyond your traditional number go up upgrades and various unlocks (which also exist here). Sometimes the greatest sense of feedback a player can experience is simply by “gittin gud”, and this game really has refined that loop to an artform.

It is impressive how quickly and organically you go from feeling like you’re trying to pat your head and rub your belly, to cleanly shooting, hacking, positioning, target prioritising and dodging all simultaneously, meeting head on whatever the game throws at you. At its heights, this is just an incredible feeling video game to play, and there isn’t really much else out there like this. This is felt most completely during the boss encounters, and each boss showdown was the highlight of this game for me, I loved every one of them.

That said, as more mechanics and enemy types are introduced to fight against, the more you have to sort of rewire your brain to stop thinking about combat encounters as combat encounters in the traditional sense. Even minusing out the hacking element, combat encounters are set out more like puzzles to solve, and while you can absolutely brute force most encounters for the first half or so of the game, during the final third or so of the game the game defaults more to the lazy difficulty design of “encounter gauntlets”.

As the game started to shove me down more and more of these, I started to find my general enjoyment with this game shifting more into exhaustion instead. So much so the boss fights ended up feeling like the release valve, as they were often less mentally demanding than the regular encounters.

I still do overall admire the design of this game, and I want to make that clear. There is so much care and intent placed into every part of this, from exploration, to upgrades, to encounters, to story reveals, to just everything. This is a labour of love and it shows. But I can say that while also saying that after I finish my shift at work, and get to enjoy my precious gaming hours in the evening, playing a game that is as taxing as this can be in that last third just isn’t really for me.

With this in mind, while the game’s short running time is clearly designed in the mind you run it over and over like the Resi games, in this case carrying over your various upgrades to NG+ runs and really dig into the game’s surprising mechanical depth and various challenges to experience the most complete version of Pragmata. Honestly, one run through was enough for me. I enjoyed my time for the most part, but I am more than happy to close the book now I’m done and move onto something else.