I think Pragmata is a good video game.
Hugh the astronaut has come to a moon base to investigate why communications have shut down. There, he finds a bunch of out of control murderous robots and also an adorable little android girl named Diana who helps him uncover the mysteries of what's going on on the moon.
Ultimately, I found the plot to be a little bare bones. Most of it hinged on you liking Hugh and Diana's relationship, which is reasonably adorable. Hugh, a gruff adult man, has a very parental relationship with Diana, who seems mentally to be the equivalent of a human child in the 6-7 age range. She asks a lot of questions and Hugh does his best to answer them and then she calls back his answers later on in ways that says the writers were paying attention to what they were doing. It's very heart warming That said the actual plot about the mystery of moon base is...not much. It was fine. I kept on expecting one more plot twist that never happened.
The actual gameplay, however, is incredible.
The gimmick of the game is that all the evil robots trying to kill you are largely bulletproof, and your guns do very little damage to them (you're plinking away for like 17 damage a shot and the weakest enemies have like 800 hp). The only way to progress is to rely on Diana's hacking ability. This is visualized in the game as a grid you can move a cursor around on, grabbing hacking "nodes" that give successive debuffs to the enemies, allowing you to pop their armor open so you can effectively fight them, but also to do things like confuse them so they fight each other, freeze them in place, steal HP from them to repair your spacesuit, and more. There's a TON of options in the hacking that you need to balance with keeping track of the actual physical positions of yourself and the robots so you don't get stabbed in the face.
The number of options you have for how to fight is truly remarkable. Most of your weapons are very powerful but have limited ammunition, and each of them has their own very effective use cases. It constantly forces you to think on your feet as you keep track of three or four things going on at any given moment. It's just....really fun. It feels good to play.
I got end credits the other day but the game implied there's still a lot more content to investigate and I plan to get back to it eventually to explore that.
I recommend investigating it and giving the demo (free on steam) a shot to see if it's up your alley.
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