For those unaware, in screenwriting, the most popular and commercially viable way to structure a screenplay is the Three Act Structure. In a two-hour movie, you have the first half-hour (roughly the first 30 pages, as the general rule is that each page in a screenplay equates to a minute of screen time) as Act One, in which the characters are introduced, the premise is laid out, the plot gets going, and by the end of it, you have Plot Point One, in which your protagonist is forced to make a decision that will drive the story forward. Act Two is the meat of the story, lasting about an hour, or 60 pages, in which the protagonist encounters obstacles to their goal and either surpasses them or fails and has to find other routes to their goal. But Act Two is divided by the Midpoint Shift, which typically happens at the midpoint of both the act and the movie as a whole. The Midpoint Shift typically has some fundamental element of the story transform, either through the revelation of some new information, a change in scenery, or some event that significantly changes things. Perhaps the starkest Midpoint Shift I can think of in cinema is the one in Jaws, where the first half of the movie takes place in a Massachusetts beach resort town plagued by a man-eating shark, and the second half focuses on three men hunting said shark in a little boat out on the water.
Plot Point Two, then, marks the end of Act Two and is another major decision point for the protagonist. I've found that a Plot Point Two can often share elements with the Midpoint Shift. It's here, I think that you tend to get big revelatory twists. For instance, I think in Fight Club, the Midpoint Shift is when the Fight Club transforms into Project Mayhem, but Plot Point Two is when the narrator discovers the true nature of his relationship with Tyler Durden.
Games don't adhere to this structure in quite the same way, in part because they're meant to go longer than a feature film. And in fairness, things like major plot twists don't always come at Plot Point Two - sometimes they come right before the climax, and sometimes they're really the end of the movie, a rug-pull that the protagonist doesn't get to respond to (and might either not be aware of, or sometimes the twist is something the protagonist has always known and the rug-pull is on the audience alone).
Classically, in a video game, the climax is the final boss - the (theoretically) toughest challenge and a confrontation with the main antagonist. But outside of the tight 2-hour structure in film (something that I think Hollywood has drifted away from as they've been more comfortable making longer movies) it's sometimes not totally clear whether a major reversal is just changing the nature of the game in a Midpoint Shift kind of way, or if it's the accelerant that starts racing us to the climax like a Plot Point Two.
All that said:
In Pragmata, I've hit a major plot beat that feels like it's either the Midpoint Shift or Plot Point Two. I'm leaning toward the latter, but I don't know how much of the game I have left.
Spoilers Ahead:
There are very few actual characters in Pragmata. Aside from Hugh and Diana, and I guess Cabin (though he's very clearly non-sentient, as opposed to Diana, who sure passes any Turing Test and then some,) you have what appear to be posthumous characters, and Hugh's doomed co-workers from the start of the game. Doctor Higgins, who created the Pragmata, is clearly an important figure, but we don't know if he's still alive.
That leaves Eight, Diana's older/younger sister, designed to look like Higgins' daughter same as Diana. We're introduced to us in the third "level" of the game, and she grants Diana a code that will stop IDUS, the (presumably non-sentient) AI that seems to have turned the robots against everyone. IDUS has been trying to kill us constantly, so we naturally assume that it's gone evil.
But when we finally reach the central terminal to shut it off, Eight shows up in a very dark-wizard mode and shoots at Hugh with a spike of corrupted lunafiliment. Diana steps in the way, getting an arm and a leg blown off, and we're then treated to a trip to the Cradle, where she and Eight were created, to learn more about their backstories and also to fix Diana, rebuilding her severed limbs and purging her of the corrupted material.
Pragamata is not a horror game, but it has some creepy elements, including some of the robot designs that look a little more organic (even if they're not). The corrupted filament is not just bad, but apparently consumes organic matter, so if it were to reach Earth, it would be an apocalyptic threat. Its appearance is also pretty creepy, bruise-purple and red, and it interferes with Diana's hacking ability while damaging Hugh's suit.
How this all works is a little complicated, but the story goes that Dr. Higgins was researching the use of lunafilament to treat his young daughter Daisy for some unknown disease. He created the Pragamata to serve as test subjects - recreating Daisy as best as he could so that he could try out treatments on them before bringing his research back to cure Daisy. I don't know how that would work given that, while life-like in appearance, the Pragmata are still synthetic and made out of different stuff (though apparently you can print very life-like things, like the trees in the Terra Dome).
Diana was "7" because she was built to resemble a 7-year-old Daisy, and her model automatically purges corrupted filament, which apparently wasn't ideal for the experiments Higgins was performing. Eight, built later and based on the 8-year-old Daisy, was changed to instead store the corrupted stuff, which has apparently turned her evil.
We don't know exactly what the source of Lunafilament was - it's apparently native to the moon, hence why the facility is here, but it's also a good thing it's isolated from Earth. I had been wondering if we were going to be getting some kind of alien life plot here, but so far it really does seem like it's purely technology run amuck.
Anyway, as the story continue, the mechanics of the game also expand a bit. It's not quite a full Metroidvania, but we do get some abilities that allow access to earlier areas. I spent yesterday just clearing out old levels and gathering up every collectable item (actually not sure if I have all the Cabin models, but I've got the "100%" completion in the four levels/zones I've been to (I suspect you can't go back to the Cradle, because there are no items to collect there).
I'm curious to see if one can upgrade everything on a single playthrough. There are myriad training missions that I have not yet done (though I've done a fair few of them) which are basically like mini-challenges that can net you some resources. Generally, I've been focusing on Mods and hacking modes that help me overheat enemies, which allows Hugh to get a critical hit that often will just kill a bot if you're able to land it. My only complaint is that I think there's only a single voice line that plays when Hugh does the critical hit animation "Take This!"
I was honestly worried I'd get sick of the hacking mini-game after getting farther into the game, but I think they managed to get the timing of enemy attacks right that you usually feel like you have a window to do the hack, and so it feels more like you're making strategic choices than feeling rushed. It's a core gameplay system, and honestly more sophisticated than the shooting mechanics, and so it's a good thing that the developers clearly poured a lot of thought into it.
Thematically, I don't know that the game is shooting for anything terribly profound, except perhaps the emotional bond that Hugh makes with Diana (I'm not saying it's guaranteed, but I have a feeling that we might have a real tearjerker ending where Hugh has to leave her behind). Naturally, the advent of 3D printing is a major element of the story. Likewise, anxieties about AI are also a major theme that's relevant today, though I think that this story doesn't really comment directly on the way that AI is taking shape today with the LLM models. (I watched John Oliver's bit on AI Chatbots recently, and there's some genuinely chilling stuff there).
Interestingly, Hugh is introduced as someone skeptical about robots, as we see the bots on the station performing manual labor functions. But while he initially thinks Diana is an actual child, upon learning she's also a robot, he doesn't waste any time in thinking of her as a real person (in an interesting bit of artistic direction, Hugh is always in his heavy space suit, usually with his opaque faceplate in place, so that he has a bit of a robotic appearance, while Diana doesn't even need a suit when you're outside the airlocks on the moon's surface, so we see more of her "human" appearance).
Diana acts very much like a child, drawing pictures with crayons for Hugh. As you collect more of the REM data, you create holodeck-like scenes that feel very much like the sort of environments you'd want to create for a kid, and the Shelter, your home base, which begins very sterile, starts to look more and more like a home with a child in it (complete with toys left out on the ground).
Hugh is single and doesn't have a kid, but develops very father-like protective instincts toward Diana basically instantly (as many reviewers have pointed out, unlike other popular "Dad simulators" like The Last of Us or the Norse God of War games, our pro-dad-gonist here is not gruff or cold, but is eager to be both supportive and open with Diana about his own life, thoughts, and history. It helps that Hugh seems to have had a pretty happy life prior to this crisis, with a loving family).
I don't think the game wants us to feel any doubt in Diana's likability. We're not in Ex Machina territory here. Indeed, the presence of Eight as the dark shadow to Diana if anything really cements the latter as someone we can fully invest in, if her convincing childlike behavior hadn't already.
It's actually kind of interesting - one could argue that Diana is just as much the "player character" as Hugh, given how integral her hacking is to the gameplay.
Anyway, I don't know how much of the game I have left. I vaguely remember seeing somewhere that there were six major "levels" to the game, which would mean I'm about 2/3s through it, which would then suggest we're probably talking a Plot Point Two here.
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