Take a glance at a trailer for Pragmata and you could probably make some educated guesses about its story. Set on the moon, Capcom’s sci-fi game stars Hugh, an astronaut who finds himself stranded on an abandoned lunar base run by a rogue AI. The parallels to modern tech write themselves in your typical tale of evil robots and the shady corporations that created them. It’s generic sci-fi fare filled with dated anxieties, but there’s a morsel of meat on that bone for you to chew on between shootouts.
If that sounds shallow, that’s because Pragmata’s heart isn’t really in creating a tech cautionary tale. AI and 3D printing are just convenient ways to generate clever hacking action and place diverse biomes on the moon. The real focus of Pragmata is an unexpectedly sincere parenting story. And while the tale of a father and his kid is just as played out as evil robots in prestige games these days, Pragmata separates itself from the God of Wars of the world by offering a bold thesis: maybe raising a kid is fun and cool, actually.
When Pragmata begins, it seems like we’re headed for a story we’ve seen a lot over the last decade. After an accident on the base, Hugh crosses paths with Diana, a blonde-haired android who looks and acts like a little girl. She’s insistent on helping him fight off some incoming robots, but Hugh shoos her off. It sure looks like the start of an unwitting partnership. The macho Hugh will have to pair up with this annoying pest, and perhaps slowly learn to become a surrogate father to her amid constant tension. Games like The Last of Us floated into my head in the opening moments, tales of strained relationships between tortured men and children who have to work to earn their affection.
Hugh’s unwilling parent arc ends almost immediately. As soon as Diana helps him hack a robot, his stoic demeanor changes. He soon becomes a big softie who shows nothing but warmth to Diana. The switch flip almost seems like a self-aware development joke. What if Dead Space’s Isaac Clarke actually turned out to be a pretty chill guy under all that armor? It’s a subversive characterization that’s reminiscent of Ichiban Kasuga in Yakuza: Like a Dragon. Kasuga, a painfully sincere goofball, entered that soap opera after 15 years of players controlling Kazuma Kiryu, a comparatively chilly hero who hid his heart of gold under a pristine suit. Hugh doesn’t quite have Kasuga’s puppy-dog energy, but he does feel like the guy who melts into a gooey puddle when he meets that puppy dog.
