“I don’t really want to delve into previous concepts,” Pragmata producer Naoto Oyama tactfully offers, after I prod at the prickly topic of the lengthy development of Capcom’s latest weird and wonderful offering.
This mysterious game about the unlikely pairing of a spacesuit-clad bloke and a barefoot young kid (who is, of course, actually an android) has been rattling around for years. First announced in 2020, it was originally slated for a 2022 release. It was then shunted to 2023, then delayed indefinitely. Now, it’s locked in for a 2026 release. Perhaps understandably, Oyama doesn’t really want to talk about all that.
“Just verbally it might sound like, ‘oh this was great and that was great’ – even if on the whole, in the game, it didn’t work,” the amiable producer, who also worked on Dragon’s Dogma 2, explains. “So we’re going to skip over talking about what we had in the past and delve into what we have here today.”
Which, y’know, fair enough. That tracks, especially in an era where many have a low desire for context and a high affinity for outrage. At the same time, though, Pragmata’s extended development is fascinating – and arguably key to the game’s clear successes.
As has been touched on in two separate Eurogamer hands-on previews since the game broke cover in June, Pragmata is weird, wonderful, and unique. It’s the sort of genre mash-up and mechanical melding that is seldom seen from big-budget, big-money publishers like Capcom.