Capcom had one of the best showings at this year’s Summer Game Fest. Despite Resident Evil 9 Requiem’s very exclusive demo, the publisher’s other hands-on preview, Pragmata, was much more open. This is an upcoming action shooter that impressed me with its unique gun-hacking mechanic.
My hands-on demo started with the game’s protagonist, Hugh Williams, regaining consciousness on a space station with the help of Diana, an android companion that looks like a young girl with long blonde hair and, for some reason, no shoes. We’re quickly attacked by a robot that is slowly walking toward us ,and our pistol is doing little to no damage. This is when Pragmata introduces the hacking element to its combat, a unique mechanic you perform while fighting. This was a lot to juggle at first, but it becomes easy and fun pretty quickly.
While you can aim with L2 and shoot with R2, like a typical shooter, you must utilize Diana’s hacking ability to open up weak points on each enemy. When targeting an enemy, a grid appears, called the Hacking Matrix, on the right side of the screen. From there, you must use the face buttons to move an icon through the grid in order to reach a specific point.
The face buttons work like a D-pad: triangle goes up, square moves left, and so on. There are also unique points within the grid that must be avoided or optionally passed through for additional benefits. Reaching the end of the grid will open up an enemy’s armor, allowing you to do much more damage with your weapons. It’s a unique combat mechanic I hadn’t seen before in a shooter and was quite easy to wrap my head around, making for a very fun gunplay loop.
After fighting the first enemy, I was able to proceed to the adjacent hallway with more obstacles and enemies. Hugh can jump with X and also hover if the button is held down. This was useful for crossing over large gaps or to evade damaging lasers. This came into play when I encountered a door that required me to search and hover around to find five locks to hack open and proceed. Several new enemy types appeared, including flying drones. The drones would easily dodge my fire, but a quick hack stunned them in place while making them susceptible to attacks. A walking tank-like enemy also appeared just as I unlocked a new weapon: the shockwave gun.
The shockwave gun functions like a shotgun, allowing me to deal much more damage to one or more enemies once hacked. In addition to this, I also unlocked the final weapon for the demo, the stasis gun. This fired similarly to a grenade launcher, with an arched shot, but would put down a bubble that would trap enemies inside and stun them. It’s super useful when dealing with more than one opponent at a time, especially since each enemy requires careful hacking to be done — sometimes more than once.
As we approached the final room of the demo, we were able to pick up a hacking node. This is a limited-use item that would slot itself into a random space within the hacking grid that appears when targeting an opponent. Moving my cursor over these nodes and then reaching the finish line in the hacking mechanic would cause a buff to deploy. This node lowers an enemy’s shields further, allowing our shots to do more damage once vulnerable.
To make things more interesting, the game mentioned you could stack these nodes and pass through more than one before finishing to get more and more benefits. Keep in mind, however, that you can’t move your cursor over a square you’ve already passed, so don’t get yourself cornered hacking while in the middle of a gun fight, which could result in having to restart the hacking matrix.
In a surprising decision, just as the final boss of the demo appeared, our hands-on preview ended. For whatever reason, Capcom didn’t allow anyone to fight the big baddie. This is especially odd, since the vast majority of demos and previews usually end after an exciting climax, like a boss battle. It was also a real shame since I had had a good amount of practice navigating the Hacking Matrix while dodging and shooting opponents, and I wanted to put my new skills to the test. If anything, it got me even more excited to get my hands on Pragmata again to play more and see what Capcom has come up with for its unique combat.
Pragmata is coming in 2026 to Xbox Series, PlayStation 5 and PC.
