The third-person shooter is a genre where it seems everything has already been invented, tried, and re-released in a collector's edition with an artbook. Take cover, peek out, fire, roll. Sometimes the enemies are special, sometimes the guns are special, but the shooting mechanics themselves have long become wallpaper: they exist, and that's fine. Exceptions are rare.

Bulletstorm once shook up the genre, turning shooting into an acrobatic show—kill stylishly, kill inventively, kill with inspiration and theatricality. Alan Wake made a full-fledged weapon out of a flashlight—first light, then bullet, no other way. Pragmata works much the same: you can just take and shoot, but that's dumb, slow, and boring, like trying to beat an opponent with a soup spoon. So any firefight starts with hacking.

It looks like this. Hugh, an astronaut in a nondescript spacesuit, shoots. Diana, a little android girl, sits on his back and hacks enemies in real time—she runs a "snake" through a grid of squares, collecting nodes and opening weak points. Until she hacks, the enemy's armor absorbs damage like the taxman takes your money. Once hacked—fire. All this happens simultaneously: your eyes dart between the crosshair and the grid, your hands do two different things at once. It sounds like a recipe for a headache, but it feels like one of the best combat systems in recent years. A wild but charming mix of Vanquish and Sudoku.

Diana is a perfect gameplay find. She's curious, strange, doesn't understand what birthdays and sunsets are, but can hack a boss the size of a multi-story building. She's impossibly talkative and comments on every picked-up gun and every bonus, but it's not annoying—she's a child after all. Diana also telegraphs enemy attacks perfectly, and if she shouts "dodge," you'd better dodge.

Capcom at its best—the second full-fledged hit in a year, and it's only April. And while Requiem sometimes felt like a mom simulator, Pragmata is from start to finish a dad simulator. A pure and fresh voice without a pedigree franchise behind it; yes, sometimes you hear Bioshock, and sometimes "Nu, pogodi," but it's not a collage, it's character. A contender for game of the year. A quiet contender that hacked you in the first hour, and you didn't even notice.

#played_ps5