Having heard good things but not a whole lot else, I decided to roll the dice and get Pragmata, the latest entry in what is apparently a very good year for Capcom.
In Pragmata, you play as Hugh, one of four technicians sent to the Delphi moon base to respond to some kind of technical problem. Shortly into your arrival, signs of strangeness abound: the augmented gravity is offline, there are no people, and there are signs of chaos. And then, a moonquake hits and two of your buddies are blasted into the vacuum (though everyone's in space suits, so I'm not convinced that they are dead) and then your commander gets crushed by a falling beam.
Hugh gets knocked out, but is patched up by an android who appears like a little girl. The android, a "Pragmata" that is of a separate kind of technology than the rest of the base, teams up with you to fight the base's robotic laborers who have all gone crazy and homicidal, and eventually Hugh comes up with an alternative name to her long serial number: Diana.
Gameplay works the following way: Hugh has a number of guns to shoot robots with, but in order to damage them, Diana needs to hack them. Targeting one of these bots in classic 3rd person shooter style will pull up a grid, and you'll use the face buttons (Triangle, Circle, X, and Square on a PlayStation one) to navigate through that maze until you get the robot to open up, exposing itself to attack and thus actual significant damage.
Strangely, it recalls Alan Wake, where the monsters must be exposed to light from your flashlight (or other sources) to remove the darkness shield before you can damage them. After a while, the bots will close up their armor again, so you'll need to hack them repeatedly if they're longer-lived foes like a boss. Various wrinkles appear that make hacking more complex. At base, you have a number of nodes that can increase the damage that Diana does with a hack, and you'll also get to pick up yellow upgrade nodes that can add effects when the target is hacked (these are treated like ammo - using them will consume them, but you can sometimes find them out in the field). Other complexities arise as the game goes on, including some negative ones, like barriers your hacking path cannot go through, or some enemies who get red shields that block off parts of the hacking grid.
While made on the RE engine, this game allows you faster movement options, like a thruster-assisted dodge that can assist both in navigating various jumping puzzles and also dodging out of the way of enemy attack (the third major boss, which I just beat, I managed on my first attempt to sit at just 36 out of a few thousand HP by being very good at dodging, though I did eventually fall and have to make a second attempt).
Hugh will be able to carry weapons in four categories, but he'll always have a weapon that simply recharges instead of being limited in ammo. The more specialized weapons (which are more or less high-damage, crowd control, and defensive) will only have a few shots, but you can also find more in the world.
There's a very slight Dark Souls element here, where enemies will respawn when you go back to your Shelter, the home base for Hugh and Diana, but this lets you then farm the Lumina that is used to buy upgrades.
While Hugh is fairly fast on his feet, the pace of combat is a little closer to those Survival Horror games the engine was built for, which is good because you're going to have moments where you have to pay attention to the hacking game. Figuring out when you have an opening to do so is part of the tactical gameplay you need to learn.
The base is divided into levels, but you can always come back to places you've visited (except possibly the opening prologue area). That said, after three such areas, I've gotten only one ability that opens up previously-blocked pathways, so I don't know that it's meant to be a true Metroidvania.
Story-wise, the base is exploring some substance discovered or at least developed on the moon that is some profoundly effective medium for 3D printing. The second level centers around a bizarre facsimile of Times Square built out of the stuff. While most of the enemies are pretty classic robots, it's in this area that we come across the first genuinely unnerving robot designs, which are towering humanoids with vaguely infantile proportions. The "goomba" robots are also humanoid, but are more realistically proportioned and only a little taller than Hugh.
The antagonist is IDUS, the base's controlling AI, which seems to have determined that any living human is an intruder. While it pops up (in the form of a floating holographic logo) periodically, it hasn't really demonstrated any personality other than an intent to kill Hugh.
The emotional core of the game, of course, is the bond between Hugh and Diana. Interestingly, I don't think you ever "die" in the game - Diana drags you back to the shelter and patches you up, and if you fall to a boss, there'll even be some dialogue between you about how you might do better next time. Even as Hugh is introduced as a skeptic toward "bots," he very quickly starts to treat Diana both as a person and as a child he intends to protect. Hugh mentions being single and childless, and was adopted, so he knows a thing or two about finding family outside of your bloodline. Diana has only ever existed on the moon, and knows very little about life on Earth (despite the fancy high-tech in the game, life on Earth is depicted as pretty modern - New York taxis are still yellow. Given all the talk about taking Diana to Earth when they're done here, I'm expecting some kind of tearjerker ending.
The game encourages you to play defensively. Healing items out in the world are quite rare, and while you can load up on healing cartridges, these can only be recharged back at the Shelter. You'll discover passages back to the Shelter in each level, which function a bit like your Dark Souls III bonfires, letting you warp back to the hub to upgrade things and also restore ammo and healing.
Again, exploration is rewarded because you'll find lots of items to upgrade your duo's capabilities. Your map is maybe even less useful than it is in Control - you'll want to form a mental map instead to understand the spatial relationships between the various locations. In the first level, there's a big room where you need to find five lock nodes to hack, and the exercise in one in figuring out all the tightly-packed routes you need to take to reach each node in a relatively small but vertical space.
I feel like I've been charging through the game, but I guess it's a sign that the gameplay is fun if I spent most of my waking hours today playing it. The second major boss was a fantastic set-piece, and I look forward to other epic experiences moving forward.
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