is a 2026 action-adventure game developed and published by Capcom. It was released for PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2 on April 17, 2026. Set on a lunar research station, the game follows spacefarer Hugh Williams and an android named Diana as they attempt to escape from the hostile artificial intelligence IDUS and return to the Earth together.
The game received generally favorable reviews and sold more than two million units within 16 days of release.
Gameplay
Pragmata is an action-adventure played from a third-person perspective. The player can control Hugh and Diana at the same time, as they look for a way to escape a crumbling lunar research station while fighting off hostile robots controlled by a malevolent AI. Hugh wields a variety of energy and electricity-based weapons and can utilize a hip-mounted jetpack to dodge attacks and reach distant areas.
As most robots have metal plating that makes bullets ineffective, Diana must use her hacking ability to open weak points that Hugh can shoot. In each hacking puzzle, the player must guide the cursor across the grid to reach the target tile, evading obstacles and toggling optional bonus nodes which may bring additional combat advantages such as increased weapon damage for Hugh. The puzzles are solved in real time, meaning that Hugh needs to dodge and evade hostile attacks during each hacking sequence.
Defeated robots leave behind "lunafilament", a material needed for Hugh to both create new weapons and gear and upgrade his and Diana's capabilities. Upgrade nodes can also be found and used to increase health, attack, and hacking levels. Hugh is also encouraged to recover "REM" data, which enables him to present Diana with special gifts that strengthen the emotional bond between them.
Plot Setting In the near future, the Delphi Corporation revolutionizes manufacturing with the invention of the "lim replicator", which can 3D print anything the user desires as long as they have a suitable blueprint. Lim replicators require a special material called "lunafilament" to function; to obtain a steady supply, a mining outpost called "The Cradle" is established on the Moon. To streamline operations, the Cradle is nominally overseen by an artificial intelligence called the Intelligent Direction Unification System (IDUS) and a massive robotic workforce.
Synopsis Delphi Corporation systems engineer Hugh Williams is sent with a support team to investigate why communications between Earth and the Cradle have been cut off. However, when they land, they find the facility mysteriously devoid of human activity. The Cradle is then struck by a sudden moonquake, separating Hugh from his team and knocking him unconscious. He is revived by a child-like android girl, Pragmata D-I-0336-7, who Hugh dubs "Diana". He quickly discovers that the Cradle's AI administrator, IDUS, has gone rogue, and it begins sending hostile robots to eliminate him. Diana assists Hugh in combat by using her abilities to hack enemy robots, making them vulnerable to Hugh's weapons. However, she has no knowledge of why IDUS went rogue or what happened to the Cradle's human staff.
Hugh decides to let Diana accompany him as he attempts to reach the Comm Tower to send a distress signal to Earth. As they fight their way through the Cradle's various facilities, Hugh begins to find himself bonding with Diana as if she were a real child. Upon reaching the Comm Tower, Hugh is dismayed to discover IDUS has already locked down all communications, but they are contacted by a girl named Eight, who tells them she is trapped in the Terra Dome sector. With Diana's insistence, Hugh decides to go help Eight. Fighting their way through the Terra Dome, Hugh and Diana finally meet Eight, who is also a Pragmata. Eight explains that IDUS went rogue after the moonquake hit, and as a Pragmata, Diana can shut down IDUS if she can issue its stop code at its mainframe. Detecting their presence, IDUS attempts to lock down the area. Hugh and Diana are forced to leave Eight behind, but not before Eight transfers IDUS' shutdown code to Diana.
Hugh and Diana continue on to the mainframe, but on the way encounter a byproduct of lunafilament called "dead filament" which is toxic to organic life. They finally reach the mainframe and shut down IDUS, only to find out IDUS was attempting to contain Eight, who plans to transport vast amounts of dead filament to contaminate Earth. Eight then attacks Hugh, with Diana getting severely damaged in the process of protecting him. Hugh rushes Diana to the Pragmatics sector, where he gets her partially repaired. There, they learn that one of the Cradle's lead scientists, Dr. Neil Higgins, created the Pragmata as test subjects to find a cure for his daughter Daisy's rare illness. Diana was considered a failure as her ability to expunge dead filament from her body prevented accurate testing, while Eight was designed to collect the dead filament. Hugh manages to fully repair Diana, which also restores her ability to purge dead filament. However, Hugh himself is infected with the dead filament, which he hides from Diana.
The pair then head to the Cradle's Central Port to put a stop to Eight's plans, and they learn Dr. Higgins had died from a combination of despair and dead filament contamination after learning Daisy died in a failed medical procedure. As a result, Eight directed IDUS to kill the Cradle staff so she can send the dead filament to Earth, believing this would fulfil Dr. Higgins' last wish to warn Earth about lunafilament's dangers. Hugh and Diana then battle Eight and defeat her. As she dissolves, Eight pleads with Diana to tell Earth about what happened to Dr. Higgins. However, as the pair look for a shuttle, they are attacked by the combined amalgamation of dead filament, which has mutated into a massive monster. Hugh and Diana are able to destroy it using a pair of powerful cannons. Now dying from the dead filament, Hugh decides to stay behind on the Moon and gives up his own suit's battery to power a cargo shuttle to send Diana to Earth.
The post-credits scene reveals Diana safely landed on Earth, and fulfilled her dream of seeing a real tropical beach. She then looks up at the Moon and declares "I'm ready."
After completing the post-game "Unknown Signal" challenges, the player receives an item that unlocks an additional scene at the end of the game suggesting that Hugh survived his dead filament infection and was retrieved by Cabin, a friendly robot who helped the player throughout the game.
Development Development on Pragmata took place over the course of six years at Capcom. The game was originally announced on June 11, 2020, during Sony's PlayStation 5 reveal stream, as Capcom's first original franchise in eight years. Based on Capcom's annual report, Brian Ashcraft of Kotaku wrote, "One reason why the game looks so different from other Capcom titles is that it's the brainchild of new development staff". After its 2020 reveal, Pragmata spent time in development hell and was delayed indefinitely. Director Cho Yonghee said that, although the game's core concept didn't change during development, the team had engaged in extensive trial and error, particularly around the game's puzzle hacking. World building was supervised by Shōji Kawamori, who worked on the Macross series.
Design
Developer Capcom struggled with creating Diana's visual design, originally wanting Diana to look like a full android. Creating a fully android character, however, brings challenges in character expression. Director Cho Yonghee cited Arale Norimaki from Dr. Slump as an android character with "cartoonish expressions", such as screwing her head off her body, that they could not recreate. As they had to contend with certain restrictions such as cultural aspects and sensitivities for the game's worldwide release, Capcom decided to translate Diana's roboticism into something more understated. Diana visually appears human but some of her machine-like mannerisms and voice venture into the uncanny valley. Compared to past Capcom projects, Diana's model was created entirely from scratch by newcomers to the company rather than using 3D scanning technology, with her animations also foregoing child actors in favor of Capcom staff themselves.
Pragmatas New York City-like level was designed to look like it was created with generative AI, appearing as "slightly distorted" according to producer Naoto Oyama with illogical errors such as taxis sinking into floors or buses sprouting out of walls. Generative AI was not used to create this look as Capcom's "human developers painstakingly worked to incorporate mechanisms that express this AI-like uncanny feel". Elie Gould of PC Gamer called this art direction "human-made AI slop". However, Capcom had to consider balancing distortions in the environment to not be too distracting or to not be mistaken for puzzle clues by players.
Casting David Menkin was cast as the English voice of Hugh Williams in 2024, spending around 18 months voicing the character. Menkin said he refrained from posting on social media about NASA's Artemis II lunar flyby mission for fear that he was breaking his NDA and could not acknowledge his role until Pragmata released. Grace Saif is the English voice for Diana. After the actors had been cast, they were brought in for a table read, which is uncommon for video games, for early cutscenes such as Hugh naming Diana. Menkin and Saif never worked together as Hugh and Diana. Menkin recorded his lines first with Saif working off them in her own recording sessions.
Technology
Pragmata was developed in Capcom's RE Engine. It supports ray traced global illumination for indirect lighting and ray traced reflections. On PC, the game supports path tracing to enable multi-bounce lighting and higher quality ray traced reflections. Engine development support manager Masaru Ijuin said that path tracing "fundamentally transforms game visuals" with it enabling "cinematic quality visuals" in Pragmata "reminiscent of high-end sci-fi films". Capcom spent 18 months working with Nvidia on implementing path tracing in Pragmata. Shader Execution Reordering (SER), first introduced with Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs, is utilized for Pragmatas path tracing to save frame time. The initial SER addition without compaction increased frame time to 23.5ms which was reduced to 16.9ms and later 13.3ms through respective optimizations on the engine and driver side. Nvidia recommends SER for future path traced titles as SER was added to DirectX Raytracing (DXR) 1.2. ReSTIR Global Illumination is used to reduce noise from indirect lighting as Capcom found that denoising using DLSS Ray Reconstruction produced ghosting artifacts. Scenes in Pragmata could be lit entirely with image-based lighting (IBL) which reduced noise. Accurately lighting RE Engine's strand-based hair in Pragmata with path tracing was a challenge. Diana's long hair diverged too far from the regular proxy mesh used as a fallback in the ray tracing bounding volume hierarchy (BVH). Full strand geometry, on the other hand, is included in the BVH for path tracing. Path tracing enables sharper, more stable reflections that are physically accurate in Pragmatas highly reflective environments such as its lunar base. Path tracing is only available on Nvidia GPUs due to forcing DLSS Ray Reconstruction without a fallback to another denoiser.