Pragmata: When A Demo Is Worth A Thousand Trailers

Back in 2020, Capcom released the first trailer for its next big action-adventure game, Pragmata, hyping it up as the first brand-new IP in nearly a decade. Now, call me a cynic, but when I saw that first trailer, do you want to know what my immediate thought was?

“Oh. It’s another AAA dad-and-daughter third-person shooter. Okay.”

Following that initial, admittedly flashy trailer, I had largely regarded Pragmata the same way I would a bowl of unflavored oatmeal: with complete indifference. Subsequent trailers in the following years did little to change that perspective, to the point that I was hard-pressed to even remember the game’s name when it wasn’t right in front of me. It was just “that dad-and-daughter thing with the guy in the bulky suit and the little robot girl.”

But then, something changed. During the Game Awards last week, following yet another trailer full of dramatic camera angles and elaborate environments, Capcom announced a Pragmata demo would be available on Steam. Indifferent though I was, I’m hard-pressed to turn down a free demo, so I downloaded it and took it for a spin. And you know what? That was what finally put Pragmata on my radar, transformed “bulky suit dad and robot daughter” into “Hugh and Diana.”

I feel as though this little shift is emblematic of a problem I’ve had with this industry for a good while now, as well as a clear indication of what can be done to remedy that problem, assuming the AAA sector can be bothered.

The Demo Gave Me Concrete Concepts To Latch Onto

Moment-to-moment gameplay is paramount

Prior to playing Pragmata’s demo, I had no real idea what its core gameplay loop even was. From the trailers that had been released so far, we can see little flashes of Hugh's gunplay, Diana doing hacky things with her fingers, and the two working together, but it wasn’t clear how all of that was supposed to coalesce into something consistent and playable.

The demo is a quick, snacky vertical slice that puts you in the shoes of Hugh and Diana (or lack of shoes in the latter’s case) as they try to navigate a derelict moon base. From the moment you start, the game outlines the core concept: Diana takes aim at encroaching robots, and a little hacking grid appears, which you navigate with your face buttons. Enemies are still moving in real time during this process, so you need to dodge and juke attacks as Hugh. Once Diana cracks the code, the robot’s vents pop open, and Hugh can properly gun them down.

From these first few seconds of gameplay, I immediately picked up what the game was putting down. It’s a multifaceted, multi-genre approach to action combat, kind of like a more advanced take on the real-time hacking minigame in BioShock 2. As the demo progressed, we got additional wrinkles in both halves of the equation; Hugh picked up more guns like a close-range shotgun or a paralyzing laser net, and Diana found special icons for her hacking grid that increase her hack’s effectiveness when passed over.

In addition to all of that, the demo has a handful of quiet moments where Hugh and Diana can just chat about nothing. All of the trailers have had them bantering in the middle of dramatic cutscenes or talking about heavy topics, but obviously, you can’t fill an entire game with just that. It’s the incidental banter that really helps you get attached to a story’s characters, at least in my opinion.

The Industry Has A Style-Over-Substance Problem

Flashy pre-rendered cutscenes are meaningless

What I’m getting at with all this is that Pragmata’s demo did a substantially better job of illustrating what the game was actually about at its core than several years’ worth of flashy trailers ever did or could have done. This is a sign of a major frustration I’ve had with the gaming industry in recent years, particularly in regard to both advertising and general design sensibilities.

In their advertising and promotion, a lot of big box games seem to forget that what they’re trying to sell us on is a game, not a movie. We see a lot of flashy, elaborate pre-rendered cutscenes and environments in these trailers, but the thing about pre-rendered cutscenes is that they don’t actually tell us anything about how the game handles. Whenever I’m trying to find concrete information about an upcoming game, I have to wade through proverbial piles of these kinds of trailers to find anything with actual gameplay in it, and even then, it’s a toss-up whether or not that gameplay will be moment-to-moment gameplay or just a heavily-edited sizzle reel.

When I saw that first Pragmata trailer years ago, I didn’t really understand what it was I was supposed to be gleaning from it, with its bulky-suited protagonist and his daughter-surrogate sidekick, its big ruined New York environment, or the weird ghost cat. Yeah, it all looked very visually interesting, but we’re not talking about a performance art piece here. We’re talking about a game.

The word “game” implies fun and enjoyment, and I wasn’t getting any kind of indication of what I was supposed to be enjoying or having fun with in that or any subsequent trailer. All I saw was yet another grizzled dad-type wading into a firefight with a child, literally the same thing we’ve been seeing over and over again from AAA games since The Last of Us. It’s the gaming equivalent of Oscar bait, it does nothing to encourage me to spend money on a game, and I’m reasonably sure I’m not alone in that.

Pragmata’s Demo Was A Major Step In The Right Direction

It finally got on my radar

After I finished the Pragmata demo, I closed it out and swiftly added the game to my Steam wishlist, checking my schedule for the next few months to see if I can slot it in when its release on April 24 rolls around. For all I know, they’ll still find some way to donk it up and render my expectations meaningless, but at least I actually have expectations now. I now know that it feels like a game I could have fun with, that Hugh and Diana are characters I could find myself getting attached to rather than a shameless cash-in on a storytelling trend that has long since run its course.

Taking a casual glance at the Steam forums and wading through all the clown-farming, feedback on the demo seems to be largely positive, which I think is proof positive of what I’m trying to say here. You can make all the high-resolution, dramatically-scored trailers you want, but unless you clearly illustrate what it is a game is supposed to be offering to prospective players, well, you’re not going to have any prospective players.

I’m not saying every big-box game needs to have a vertical slice demo, as I’m well aware that demos can be prohibitively time-consuming for devs to make. It’s more that, rather than trying to wow us with Oscar-bait trailers, a game’s advertising should focus on the gameplay first and foremost, explaining what players should expect to be doing when they boot it up.

I’ve had too many instances recently where I see a trailer for some new game and then think to myself, “that looked pretty, but what the heck kind of game even is it, though?” If it’s all style and no substance, there’s nothing for me to actually get hyped up about. You’d get the same result from shoving a static screenshot in my face and saying, “look, this will be in a game!” I’m sure it will, and it looks very nice, but looking nice does not make a game good.

Of course, given recent trends in the AAA sphere, it is entirely possible that the games just don’t have any interesting gameplay to offer, so the elaborate visual element is prioritized to try and trick players into thinking it’s more interesting than it is. That’s a separate matter, though, and at the very least, I can say with confidence that’s not a problem Pragmata is exhibiting.