Capcom's new game has reminded me how good ray-tracing can look on PC

It's always nice when something isn't really on your radar but comes out of nowhere to blow you away. I don't live under a rock in terms of gaming news, so I knew that Pragmata was imminent, but I didn't realise it would eat my weekend in the way it did when Capcom sent me a code last week.

In a time when plenty of games are basically in the same genres as each other, this is the first time in a little while that I can remember playing a super-polished title from a big publisher that feels genuinely different to anything else out there right now. That's a tall order on its own, but Pragmata manages it ably.

The game sees you take control of Hugh Williams, a mechanic of sorts sent to a massive lunar base to investigate a system shutdown. On arrival, he and his team find that the base's robotic workforce has gone a little haywire, and Hugh's soon on his own trying to bring the base back up to order so he can contact Earth for help.

PRAGMATA - Main Trailer - YouTube

Watch On

He's helped along the way by a little robotic girl that he nicknames Diana, and their two skill sets merge in combat against robot threats. Effectively, Hugh gives you traditional third-person shooter controls, but Diana adds to this with on-the-fly hacking to open up weak spots on otherwise hardy robots.

As you move and aim, basically, you have to use the face buttons on your controller to navigate a cursor through an on-screen grid maze. By passing through the right squares on your way to a glowing green confirmation square, you'll frazzle robots, and if you passed through the right power-ups, you might also activate other abilities to press home your advantage.

Image 1 of 3

Since you basically do negligible damage when robots aren't opened up by successful hacks, the game's combat arenas become really fun little management challenges. You'll constantly be working out what robot you should hack next for the best approach, while making sure to dodge the attacks and attentions of the others.

This combat loop is, in short, absolutely brilliant – it's easy to see why Capcom went ahead and bet on a new franchise built around it, since I can only assume it knew it had a winning gameplay hook from an early stage of development. This much I had hoped for, but it's still great to be so engaged by the final version.

Combat is augmented by fun exploration and a welcome traditional approach to level design. That means intricate levels that are full of extra collectables and resources, so that you're basically always rewarded for leaving the beaten track, and I've found combing for these items consistently rewarding.

What's even more of a bonus is that the game looks absolutely beautiful. I've been playing it on my Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, on PC, and it's served up a great reminder of just why we're all chasing the dragon of ray-traced lighting. Set on a lunar base, this game is absolutely full of shiny surfaces and glassy reflections, and I've regularly been stopping to take screenshots of new moments that look just beautiful.

In fact, the game's actually launching with full path tracing (an even more accurate form of ray-tracing, to the layperson), and that sees it breathing rarefied air. With the number of neon light sources and glossy surfaces at play, it's quite a showcase, but the fact that it also performs excellently is the cherry on top. I've been enjoying frame rates hovering around 90fps with every setting turned up to the maximum, but toggling on frame generation can bump that up to more like 150fps without issues.

Image 1 of 3

Capcom is on one heck of a streak right now, not just from a gameplay perspective but also where its games' presentation is concerned. It's only a few weeks since I was wowed by Resident Evil Requiem, after all, and to be able to follow that up so swiftly with another stunner is really quite something.

If anything, I actually think Pragmata might look better out of the two – Requiem's environments were gorgeous in the first half of the game, but the washed-out second half in Raccoon City was a letdown, and Pragmata so far hasn't followed the same track.

I'm at the stage where I basically can't stop playing, which is always a bit of a rush, and the temptation to start backtracking to find secrets in previous areas is already becoming a real lure. If, like me, you weren't really paying all that much attention to Pragmata, change that – it's sure to be something of a cult favourite, I'd say.