NYCC 2025: A First-Look at “Pragmata”
Bring your robot-daughter to work day meets multi-tasking of madness
At NYCC 2025, I got a hands-on look at Pragmata, CAPCOM’s long-teased game from 2020 set to release next year. In Pragmata, players face off against AI-robot enemies alongside an AI-robot companion, with CAPCOM’s insistence that no actual AI was used in the making of this game.
Set in a tech-heavy, robot-filled dystopian future and built on the company’s well-loved Resident Evil Engine, Pragmata is a brain-melting multitasking simulator that’ll prove to be a challenge to all sorts of gamers. It’s confusing at first, but in that “I can’t stop playing this” kind of way, the resulting gameplay is a mind-bending mix of shooter and puzzler unlike anything you’ve ever seen.
You begin as the space-suited main character, Hugh Williams, then quickly meet Diana, an AI robot companion that gives immediate Bioshock: Little Sister vibes. Diana is a helpful, innocent young girl companion, but also someone who’s more than meets the eye.
Here is where it gets wild. This game is not just a third-person shooter. It is a puzzler-shooter hybrid. Doors, panels, and hacking all require button sequences that shift depending on the puzzle, and the UI adapts constantly, turning gameplay into something that feels like DDR meets the circuit-grid minigames in Marvel’s Spider-Man.
You will be dodging giant robot machines, jumping, and jetpacking in combat, all while having to operate Diana’s hacks to open doors and disable robot shields. My brain hurts just thinking about it because combat is surprisingly strategic, and I’ve never played a game that asked me to actually play two games at the same exact time, which is what Pragmata asks of the player.
Your arsenal ranges from a basic pistol with slowly recharging ammo to shotguns and net casters. Special weapons can be scavenged from containers, but dealing serious damage often requires solving mini-puzzles mid-fight. To deactivate the enemy’s shields.
Visually, Pragmata is stunning with high-resolution environments, bright lighting, and robot designs that feel alive and impossibly futuristic. While the RE Engine still feels restrictive in terms of mobility (lacking the motion flourish of more action-driven narratives), the polish is very impressive and exactly the type of visuals you’d expect from CAPCOM.
On top of all this, quality-of-life touches, like a ping system for objectives and where to go on the map, help navigate the combat-heavy sprawling levels of the map and help prevent you from getting lost. There is also an ultimate ability feature that could be triggered at the final boss battle of the demo, something which feels satisfying after juggling all the chaos.
So far, Pragmata is a weird and brilliant mix of shooter and puzzle chaos. It is a brain-bending, visually gorgeous experience, not easy, but as the old saying goes, the best things in life never are. CAPCOM might be showing us a glimpse of the future of action games, and I cannot wait to see more, as I was unexpectedly taken aback by this one, and I’ve played everything you can imagine at this point in my life.
Pragmata is set for release on Windows, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X | S in 2026. It was developed and produced by CAPCOM.
Christian Angeles is a writer and entertainment journalist with nearly a decade of experience covering comics, video games, and digital media. He was senior editor at The Beat during its Eisner Award–winning year and also served as managing editor of The Workprint. Outside of journalism, he writes comics and books.
 | A guest post by
|