Tokyo Game Show 2025

Pragmata is a Souls-Like With Guns and Constant Mini-games

At Tokyo Game Show 2025 Anime News Network was able to get thirty minutes with CAPCOM's upcoming sci-fi game Pragmata. In the demo, you play as the team of astronaut Hugh and android child Diana and work on escaping a lunar research station that has been overrun by killer machines.

While ostensibly a third-person shooter, Pragmata is built upon the skeleton of a Souls-like. As you move through each area you come upon a save point “bonfire”—which in this case is an escape hatch. When you use it, you return to the hub area where you can heal and/or upgrade your weapons and other gear. Then, you can return back to where you were—but doing so resets all the enemies in the area.

Meanwhile, in combat the enemies move slowly and hit hard. This is done to facilitate the game's unique gimmick: hacking. Each enemy robot you encounter is all but invincible to start. To defeat them, you must first hack them—which is done by aiming at them and completing a simple minigame (based loosely on the classic game of Snake) using the controller's face buttons. Doing opens their armor and/or debuffs them in certain ways, allowing you to shoot them with Hugh's gun. Of course, the trick is you have to do this hacking mini-game mid-combat; there's no pause or time slowdown. You may need to dodge or shoot even as you play the mini-game. It splits your attention in a cool way.

As for the shooting, there are a variety of weapons. One, for example, fires a net over an area, stunning multiple enemies and allowing you a chance to hack without danger. Another is a shotgun, able to deal with large enemies much more easily then Hugh's basic pistol. The trick, however, is that while Hugh's pistol regenerates ammo on its own, the other weapons do not. Thus, you're always forced to ponder whether to use your scarce ammo or not in any given battle.

Before long, each battle becomes a psuedo-puzzle in and of itself. Which enemy do you hack first? How do you deal with the cramped environment of any given room in the research facility? Is it worth it to use your limited resources? It's honestly quite fun to juggle all these different questions—at least in the short term with the TGS demo.

Outside of combat, there is a surprising amount of platforming. Hugh can use his jump jets to glide a short distance and there are many gaps that need crossing. There are also several non-combat hacking mini-games that do everything from raising platforms to shutting off traps which allow Hugh and Diana to progress.

On top of the standard route through the facility, there are also many optional paths. These are filled with both enemies and upgrade materials—making them dangerous and rewarding. And since you can always ping to highlight where you need to go to further the story, finding these paths is not too difficult.

In the end, Pragmata forms a solid base by mixing the unique and the familiar. As long as it gets more complicated and chaotic as the game progresses—introducing new hacking mini-games and enemy types—Pragmata could be a lot of fun. Here's hoping.

Pragmata is set to release on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S sometime in 2026.