Capcom has announced that its brand-new dad-daughter space-shepherding action game, Pragmata, has already sold over one million copies in the two days since its launch on Friday. That’s a pretty good start for a new project, let alone one “primarily by a team of younger Capcom developers”, and that had suffered three delays to get here.
Pragmata was originally announced in June 2020, where it was planned to launch just two years later in 2022. While the reveal trailer didn’t give away much in the way of actual gameplay, Capcom’s brand-new universe had us all hooked from the outset with its weirdness: a ghostly cat, a robot girl, and an astronaut in New York—which was actually on the moon.
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Of course, Pragmata actually released last Friday, and it’s certainly not 2022 anymore. As the game’s director, Cho Yonghee, explained to TheGamer last year, “There was so much trial and error and back and forth just to see what could land and what works best,” particularly regarding the hacking system. I’m not surprised that finding a way to smash Hugh’s third-person shooting with Diana’s hacking into one cohesive system was the main roadblock. But it works almost flawlessly now, at least; we gave Pragmata an 87 in our review, describing it as “a cult classic in the making”.
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Being a new game, and a very weird one at that, Pragmata’s demo was an important milestone. While Capcom’s corporate investor relations team excitedly explains it helped “communicate the unique features of the game to a wider audience”, speaking from my own experience, it was an opportunity to see that Pragmata had the sauce after such a turbulent development—that’s not usually the recipe for success.
Pragmata’s demo reached over two million downloads and wishlists, which was quite the head start to its strong launch weekend. Of course, we don’t really know what constitutes success for Pragmata as a potential franchise after a very drawn-out development, but I’d love to see it get a sequel of some kind. It feels like exactly the type of game where the second stab at it perfects the formula. Until we get an indication of that, I’ll be shooting for 100% completion on every level and wrapping up the post-game.
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