Pragmata preview: a refreshingly strange shooter

A two-hour hands-on with Pragmata cleared up several long-standing questions from its 2020 reveal: his friends are dead, she does not, and the Times Square mystery is a yes/no/kinda. The preview also made clear the game is not a stealth Mega Man title. The demo begins in a hub on a lunar station where protagonists Hugh and Diana spend currencies to upgrade weapons, abilities, suit stats and Diana’s hacking prowess.

From that hub you select numbered regions; the preview opened in region two, the Mass Production Array, where the immediate task is to repair a communications tower and establish a link to Earth, then moves into a facsimile of New York created as part of an Urban Recreation Project.

Combat blends third-person shooting with a board-game-like hacking minigame: using the D-pad you guide a cursor through a square maze so Diana can expose enemy weak points for Hugh to shoot.

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