At the second Sony PlayStation State of Play of the year that took place very early this morning, one announcement stood out from the others (for me anyway). And while we’ll take a detailed look at the entire showcase in a separate article, the game we’re going to focus on here — as those among you who read headlines closely have probably guessed — is Capcom’s Pragmata.
Before we look at the latest trailer (dubbed ‘First Contact’), it’s worth taking a brief journey down memory lane. By the way, how crazy is it that a game that was part of the showcase designed to hype the then-upcoming PlayStation 5 may actually end up launching towards the end of that console’s lifecycle? It was at “The Future of Gaming Show” in June 2020 that a teaser for Pragmata first brought the game to the public eye.
I recall being equally intrigued and baffled by the whole “spaceman walking through what looks like an abandoned Times Square, running into a girl, seeing holographic cat, avoiding certain death, landing on the Moon and talking freedom” bit. Naturally, 2022 (the expected launch year) couldn’t come soon enough. Over the next few months, more trailers and eventual launches for a majority of the other titles showcased in June 2020 began to emerge, but it was all quiet on the Pragmata front. Until November 2021, that is, when Capcom announced that the game would be delayed by a year. The press release read, “Our team is hard at work on the project, but to ensure this will be an unforgettable adventure, we’ve decided to shift the release window to 2023.”
This was, by no means, unprecedented, because delays in games to tend to be fairly common. But it did raise questions about whether the game was stuck in development hell, turning into a live-service hero shooter (as has been the fashion this decade) or worse, being cancelled altogether. Everything would be clearer in 2023. Probably. Or so thought the handful of followers the game had already accrued on the strength of its initial trailer. And soon, 2023 came along, but no sign of Pragmata. This silence continued until June’s Capcom showcase where a new trailer was shown, and for the first time, the world got to see extremely tiny glimpses of what seemed to be gameplay footage.
“It is with a heavy heart,” began the text on the card that popped up at the end of the trailer to announce a further delay. And after a couple of lines that spoke about the studio being ‘hard at work’ and ‘doing their best’ to build the game, it appeared that anything resembling a date was conspicuously absent. The game had been pushed back indefinitely. And over the following months, it was not even being discussed anymore except in a few subreddits and random posts on social media. Hell, even I hadn’t thought about the title until February’s State of Play, when I shed a solitary tear and observed a moment’s silence for what could’ve been.
Flash-forward to June 5, 2025 and it appears Pragmata is back in play.
From the looks of things, the years seem to have been great for Diana’s (the little girl) hair. Plus, she looks to be quite handy in tricky situations. There’s some lore too now with the Delphi Corporation being introduced. And also, there appeared to be some actual gameplay in the footage. Of course, none of this guarantees that anything will actually come of Pragmata, never mind its projected 2026 launch. Not least because there’ve been so few signs of life in the past five years. All that said, there’s little we can do beyond waiting, watching and hoping this doesn’t turn into a PlayStation 6 launch title.
Meanwhile, check out Pragmata director Cho Yonghee’s blog on the game.
