Pragmata is Looking Like Capcom's Next Switch 2 Hit *our hands-on impressions*

0:00This dog salon, operational excellence, thanks to genius from global payments. Scheduling, personalized, checkouts, instant, absolutely genius, big league reliability for any business. That's genius. Hi, this is Alex Cantrowitz. I'm the host of Big Technology Podcast, a longtime reporter and an on-air contributor to CNBC. And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing the business world and our lives. So each week on Big Technology, I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech and outsiders trying to influence it, asking where this is all going. They come from places like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty more. So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices, and meetings with your colleagues and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We got a chance to play Pregnata, new game coming out at the in the middle of April, I believe. Yep, they just changed the release date recently.

1:00They moved it up. They moved it up. Another great Capcom game. This game is coming to a Switch 2, although what we played was on a PS5 Pro, I believe. Yes, we got to play this game recently, a very updated chunk of the game. We got to play for about two hours of this area that was kind of like, you know, you're in this space facility and they had recreated New York Times Square. Right, right. And I think we'd seen that in some of the trailers before, it's kind of stood up to me. Like, wait, are you actually going back to Earth or what is this? Yeah. No, we're still on this space facility. Yeah. Yeah, we didn't get to play it on the Switch 2, but the good news is there is a demo available for the game. Yeah. So if you're curious, I'm like, well, how does this look out of this run? Just go play it yourself. Just play it yourself. And find out for yourself. Yeah. Play it yourself, exactly. Yeah. We have been following this game for a long time now. We've played several chunks of this game. This is a pretty, obviously, pretty close to release chunk of the game since it's coming

2:03out in just a few, in less than a month, which is exciting. But you know, it's one of those Capcom games that is a bit more, you know, unique and different. And something that kind of was this highly anticipated game that was like, when is this game coming out? So yeah, the gameplay is pretty different. So I want to talk about that a little bit more. Yeah. And this game has a really interesting sort of development backstory to it where it was announced many, many years ago. Right. It was like 2021. And then it just kind of vanished and it was like, did this get canceled? Like what happened? No. And it re-emerged. Reemerged is this. Okay, this could be like another cult classic game. But now I see it like all these like poles of like most anticipated games like this is near the top. I was like, maybe this has a bigger hit potential than I initially thought. And the reason I thought that is due to the gameplay, which is a little different. They're doing some new things in a third person shooter game where you play as Hugh, who's

3:03this big guy in a space suit who's got guns and he shoots and that, that all feels like a normal third person shooter. But then on his shoulder, he has this Android little girl, Diana, who she can hack into things. So as you are shooting and you're doing aiming with the sticks and the triggers, you also need to use the four face buttons to navigate this like grid puzzle to weaken the enemies to actually be able to do proper damage and inflict other debuffs on them. So it's kind of like patch your head, rub your stomach. I was just going to say you're going to be asked to do a lot during very high action moments, which is cool. It's interesting. It's definitely different. And it's a little bit hard to describe. So yeah, definitely encourage people who are curious about this to play the demo for themselves to really try out that mechanic. And the first time we played the game, it was like, I think it had to have been like almost the beginning of the game. It was. Yeah.

4:04Very basic. And they told me, hey, this is going to feel a little unusual at first. So you need to figure it out. This demo that we did, they told us it like, this is much deeper into the game. You're going to be pushed. So make sure you refresh yourself. Like how to do this. Maybe go play the demo again before you come see this so you can get through it. Yeah. And it definitely was a lot more comfortable. Exactly. And the enemies were a lot more challenging as well to take down. There was a lot more like layers to how you should strategize, how you should like, you know, prioritize the hacking part of it versus the shooting part of it. There's a lot of layers to this gameplay that I found. And, you know, not only are you using Diana for the hacking, there's different things that you need to take into account, like, for example, if you're hacking through one of the enemies, you could go through a path which gives you some additional items, like a shield or other ways to maybe even hack multiple enemies at once. So you have to be kind of strategic about how you do the hacking part. And then on the shooting side as you, he's got tons of guns to choose from.

5:08You know, you can choose from just the normal, the normal gun to like more of like a shotgun, to more of like a rifle, to more of like a stasis gun. So there's a lot of different options on how you're mixing and matching the shooting and the hacking for like the greatest chance of success. Yeah. The gun management is a big part of the game because you always have just your little pistol thing that has regenerating ammo, so you never need to worry about ammo for that. And then you have these two other slots, but you can't necessarily pick up any gun and put it in any slot. There's like our certain types of guns go in this slot, certain types of guns go in the other slot. So you are often faced with a decision of like, oh, based on what I think might be coming up ahead, which gun is going to be better choosing like a rifle versus like more of a shotgun or grenade launcher type of thing. And those did sometimes make me think of like, oh, I'm not exactly sure what to get, which is not always the case where some games like gun, gun, gun, pick them all up.

6:09Right, right. You really have to be strategic. And there's not that much ammo for each of those guns as well. It's very limited. You have to be very careful about like, okay, when should I strategically switch to this more powerful gun and use one of those precious bullets, you know? Exactly. And the good thing is again, that pistol never runs out of the ammo. It is like surprisingly useful, like even deeper into the game. It's not like, oh, I would never use that again. Like, no, you totally will be. Exactly. Yeah. Going into it, like the big question I had was like, all right, you've got this new mechanic that seems fun and novel, but like, can it really carry a full game, you know, however long, 15 hours where I have her long this game is, like, am I still going to be enjoying this? If this is like the main thing that I'm going to be doing, I think the answer is yes. Absolutely. I think so too. I was actually very challenged by this. Like, I was, I was the last one to finish the demo out of our group because I was, I kept doing it because it was hard. And you know, like I was saying before, there's just a lot of layers to it. There's a lot of times where like, I experimented with it one way with a certain type of gun, with a certain way I was hacking and it didn't work for me.

7:12So I would have to like redo it, but you learn, you're like, okay, don't do that again. Don't get, you know, don't, don't stand here and get mobbed without a stasis gun to help you manage the crowds. Don't, you know, don't miss out on this half because that's very important. So I was like learning along the way. So it's very, it's very deep. You have to have, you have to have, you can have to, you can shoot it and you can do damage, but it's like a fraction of the damage that if you properly hack it and expose the weak points. So there's something that you really must do and it's like, that's like so interesting to me that you can have a single mechanic that can carry an entire game like that. Sometimes games, the mechanic is good enough to do that. Sometimes it isn't. In a case where wow, it actually is and that kind of surprised me. It really is. And the other thing that surprised me kind of going along with how this mechanic kind of is able to be carried throughout the game and still feel fresh and fun is the enemies are designed in a way where it kind of keeps you on your toes with the hacking and the shooting

8:13as well. Like one of the enemies we encountered was terrifying, by the way, as a giant robot baby. And it had, it would like have these shields over the parts that you can hack. So when you like switch to Diana to do the hacking, if the shields were up, if the screen would be like blocked out so you couldn't see your hack path. So then you would have to like switch back over to you and shoot the shields away and then kind of expose your path for the hacking. So I found that to be really fun because it's like not only are you doing this like hacking and shooting mechanic, but each enemy is like kind of behaving in a different way where you have to be smart about how you're doing it. So I think that's why it was able to be carried throughout the game is because like there's a lot of nuance and a lot of variety to how you're doing it. So I was really surprised by it. It's pretty hard for me. I'm just going to say it was hard.

9:14It was hard for me. Well you were the last to finish what you didn't say is that I was the first to finish. Were you really? I think I was. We're in a ton of people in our session, but I felt like I was making good progress through it. Yeah. We did a boss fight. The area that we were in, the area that we were in was very large. Yeah. And at first I was like, oh, we had to do a number of different objectives to open up this big gate. Yes. And I wasn't certain if you could do those in any particular order because again, you're just kind of dropped into this time square and it's like, oh, they're all around you. So find them. And it felt like me to the path that I took felt pretty seamless and it's like, oh, yeah, it makes sense to go to this one next. I don't know if you have a lot of freedom. I don't think you did actually. And how to do it? I think you were forced to go through that first store first and then that kind of led you to all the other, the other ones to open to get the keys. Yeah. But there was a big boss fight at the end. Yeah. That was very tough. It was a giant robot. Yes. It felt kind of like a combination of like Monster Hunter meets the horizon series.

10:19I was just a horizon. Because it was like a big robotic dinosaur. Big neck thing. Kind of thing. Yes. And that took me probably like 20 minutes. At least. Yeah. It was a long fight. I did good. I didn't actually didn't die during the boss fight. Yeah. I was just like very careful. They're like picking through it. But it was very, it was a very cool like show piece because like you were saying, it's kind of this like, you're still, you know, I think you're still on the moon, but they had built this like replica of New York City. And you're fighting this monster in this like replica time square. And it was like really weird. And they would do these things where it would like 3D print things to like build these towers. And you had to climb the towers to get like a better shot. It was cool. It was a fun calm. There were some fun calm references. And it was like, oh, it's a movie theater. And it's got like when everything was like out slightly off because it's like the junkie AI that you're using to make this. Yeah. Yeah. It was like, Resident Evil and then there'd be some other word that didn't quite fit. Yeah. Like ghost of ghouls. Yeah. Like ghost of ghouls instead. I think something like that.

11:20Exactly. What it is. Yeah. So that was cool. Yeah. But yeah, the boss fight was really intense, really long, like multi-phase kind of thing. Right. Okay. Now it's doing this. What do I need to figure out? Mm-hmm. A lot of kind of managing the size of the enemy of like, well, I know what I need to shoot, but it's so big. Like how do I do that? And there were sometimes where it's like, you can like hook shot up to the top of a building to get the angle. And it would like knock the building down. Yeah. It really, like, it had the intensity of a monster hunter fight. Yeah. And this is about endurance. And there was like some of those ALE attacks that it would do that totally reminded us of monster hunter. Like you get caught and that used just like a one shot kill, basically. Yeah. So it was like high stakes. Yeah. But I really enjoyed that boss fight because I felt like it was, it properly felt like this like big moment. Yeah. We spent all that time basically unlocking this big gate to the boss. So it was a very satisfactory conclusion to that. It's like, oh, I finally opened this big giant gate opened up and then you're like, what's

12:23behind it? Obviously probably some kind of scary boss and it definitely like met those expectations. Hey, I'm Josh Speagle, host of the podcast, Lunatic in the newsroom. If you enjoy journalism that drifts into mild panic, wild overthinking and a guaranteed nervous breakdown, Lunatic in the newsroom is for you. It's news like you've never heard before. The only newsroom with a panic button, you'll laugh, you'll cry and gasp and horror as the show spirals completely out of control. It's not just news, it's emotionally unstable. Lunatic in the newsroom, listen today. Every day the world gets a little weirder and a lot more awesome. Cool stuff daily takes a look at everything from mining in space to the latest in the fight against cancer to how AI is basically changing everything. It's all the cool stuff you didn't know you need it to know. Join us for cool stuff daily as we take a quick look at science, tech and the wait, what stories that make you sound way smarter at dinner.

13:26Subscribe to cool stuff daily now because the future is happening fast and it's way to fun to miss. We did just get to see what happens in between the big missions where on the moon you have this base that's kind of a hub and there's a lot that you can do and they've done a good job of making it look like where you're living with Diana because she has a little living space and you can get things for her. They're all retro things. I found an old retro 2TB and she's like, what's this old thing? What can I do with this? Yeah and then as you're going through the world too, when you see human things you have to explain it to Diana because she's a robot. This is a globe and you can give her the globe as a gift or whatever so it is a very interesting little hub world. There's a lot of management of your character that you can do of upgrading guns. There's a lot of perks to unlock. Your suit gets upgraded as well. There's many different things that you can upgrade or unlock things for and then before

14:29you go out, you can choose like, well, I want to equip this in this or in Diana's hacking matrix. It's like, all right, I want to choose these couple special hacking activities that you had a limited number of but they seem to be pretty plentiful. You just find them around so I never felt like I was running out. I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of customization in the depth of that. There seems to be a lot of unlockables as well. There's a little robot friend and you can give it coins on special things. It did feel like that and you're encouraged to really return to that. I think you call it your shelter and there's good fast travel in the world so even when we were tooling around the fake time square and you're deep in that area, you don't have to be worried about like, oh, when am I going to get back to go back to the shelter to upgrade again? There's a lot of fast travel that you find to the end of the mission. Which is nice because you might pick up something that's going to help you.

15:32That was really important. That was an important little tip that we got from our cap conference. Go back to the shelter often to upgrade and that really helped. One thing I wouldn't say that I have the clearest handle on yet is the overall story of the game. All right. You are here. You're on the moon. You find this Android girl Diana and you're doing stuff but I don't exactly, we don't yet know the full kind of beginning of how did all this happen? What are we doing here? There's like a little breadcrumbs because they talk to each other as they are like going through the missions and stuff and they're obviously building a relationship with each other. It seems like something really bad happened. He came to the space station with a bunch of other people and they're either lost or dead. They're not there anymore. He finds Diana and he does say some stuff. If I didn't find you, I would be dead too.

16:34You saved my life. There's something that must have happened where she saves him. On her side, it's pretty interesting. She's a robot and he'll ask her questions like, who built you? What's your program? What was your purpose? I don't remember anything. I was asleep and then when I woke up, you were there. There's some mystery around this whole thing that I'm pretty intrigued by, I want to find out what's going on. It's pretty interesting. The game does say what a progmod it is, which was, it's the name of the game, but what is it? It sounds cool or what? So progmod is the type of Android that Diana is, where it's kind of like a terminator where it's like in the inside, you're a robot, but you have skin and you act like a person. It sounds like there's more than one prog, there's like many progmods, she's just one of many, but we don't know what the purpose of those are and why they were built and all

17:36that stuff. Really, really interesting kind of premise, it does have the lonely space, I really love a lonely space, like that kind of isolation, like you're running around these deserted space facilities, and you have Diana to hang out with you obviously, so it's not completely isolated, but it is a little bit like, you know, someone was here before and now it's completely deserted and you don't know why it's like a little unsettling, but also, I just like that vibe, so I think it's cool, yeah. I think we were both initially a little iffy on Diana, because what Capcom's going hard on the creepy little girl, we just finished Resident Evil Requiem, it's like there's no shortage of creepy little girls there, and then now there's Diana, even like some of the enemies in this game look like creepy babies, like the baby robot, the big babies that will like come and fall on you, so I think we were like a little iffy on her and it's like, oh, what's going on here, what, after this demo, did you feel better about

18:38her as a character, like the her and Hugh dynamic? The her and Hugh dynamic is interesting, I do want to understand like what is going on with that, you know, with each of them, she's a little annoying though, I will say, you know, she's definitely a little annoying, but the other thing, other side of is quite necessary for her to be there, because you need her to do the things, like it's like 50% Diana, 50% Hugh, it doesn't feel like she's just some hangers on, like a novie, talk your ear off side character with no purpose, so because she does have a pretty significant purpose, you have to accept her, even though some of the stuff says she's saying I'm like shut up Diana, and she looks creepy, no offense, but she looks really scary. It's kind of like a creepy dolly kind of, I'm Annie Valley, something to it, yeah, big blank eyes, like that kind of like creepy doll come to life, sort of look and it's a little

19:43scary, a little scary, right, you know, people might be saying like, oh, they're, they're you know, copying what Donkey Kong Benanza did, because they were first, they were first again, announced many, many, many, many years ago, well before we knew anything about that Donkey Kong Benanza copy, yes, but interesting that this has become a popular dynamic, yeah, the, you know, Hugh is interesting and he's so far a bit more of a bland, leading character, like you do kind of get glimpses, he does seem very interested in like, treating her, like he wants to treat her like a human child, so it's like maybe you learn like, oh, he left his family behind or something terrible happened to his family, it was like a Pinocchio situation, like it, oh yeah, we're real girl, and we're gonna go live together as like father and daughter, something like that, like they do kind of on his end, you get the sense that he might want that, as all of this is happening, but again, I think the story is still, there are still more secrets to uncover with the story. Yeah, I agree. Anything, I think, mostly we really like

20:48anything that kind of like, I'm not, I'm not super sold on yet, I don't think there's anything like that. Again, I found this game to be pretty difficult, though, for me. And I was not playing, you know, I was playing on, like, normal. If I were to play this, when I play this game, I would put it in an easy, because it's very difficult for me. But I don't think anyone else had too much trouble. It's a lot of multitasking. It's really like, and in the moment, you know, it's very, you have to be so quick, because you're like, the things, the robots are just, like, coming at you and, like, slashing and shooting at you, and you're doing so many things all at once, and you're being asked to almost do them flawlessly. It's quite the, quite the challenge I thought, which, I mean, I think some people are going to love that. But I would like the challenge to be, like, down, slightly, from my own, from my own gameplay. Yeah. For the most part, I really liked it. The only thing I would say is completely my fault and my own problem, which was at the

21:50end of the demo, I was talking to the Capcom person. I was like, oh, it's interesting that there's no, like, dodge mechanic in this game, because there's a lot of things where it's like, things are coming at you quickly. You need to get out of the way. And he was like, what do you mean? Do this? And he pushed the button and he totally dodged. So I missed that on the control sheet or whatever. It's like, oh. The dodge game was very important for boss fight. So you, this is completely my fault. I'm honestly, like, kind of impressed that you went through that entire game without even doing that. You can jump and, like, hover in the air. You've got a little backpack thing, just a pack thing. So I was literally only doing that to get away, which worked. But I was like, oh, that's amazing. You get it. It's pretty interesting. So yeah, you do have like the floaty space feeling where you can do a jump and then kind of hover towards the next thing. That helps me a lot. That's really good. I can't 3D platform either. So that was very nice. It's kind of like the Yoshi hover, you know, or like that. So do you think this has the potential to be a big new IP for Capcom? Is there maybe more of a one and done sort of deal? I think so.

22:51I think this game is super interesting. And it's like different and it, but it feels like, you know, it has like that high level of polish plus the, the action, you know, that kind of like Capcom action that only they can do. But in such a unique way, such a unique setting, like, I don't think there's any other game that I've ever played. That's this, that's like this game at all. I can't even think of even one that I would say like, well, it's kind of like this game. I can't think of it. So it's, I love how different and unique it is. I think people are going to really be surprised and enjoy that. It's awesome that it's on like pretty much every platform as well. And yeah, I can't wait to, you know, to actually like dig into this. Yeah, seriously play the demo. If you're interested in this, because that'll give you a much better impression of what we're talking about. Yeah. Instead of just trying to figure it out, it is, it is a thing you do have to try for yourself. It reminds me of, remember in the, I think of the Xbox 360 generation

23:53of lost planet that series from Capcom. I was like, I feel some similarities there. Where it's like, that was another third person shooter that had kind of an interesting backstory to it. And that series kind of went off the rails after they did a couple of those. And it eventually went off the rails. It's like, yeah, I mean, I think there's something here that they can build out. I want to know kind of more about the bigger world and story that we have here. But yeah, I guess I'm just more focused on the game itself versus like the 10 year plan for it. Yeah, yeah. I'm excited to play it. We, so we did not get to play the Switch 2 version. It wasn't there. And I don't think that's any like, it's not because it's similar. Oh, they were hiding it like even when we went to go play Resident Evil Requiem, which is great on a Switch 2. They're like, no, you're playing on a PS5. They want to show you the premier look great on a PS5. Yes. We did, though, get to see the Diana Amibo, which we hadn't seen in person. So we got a little bit of footage of that

24:54to show you here. Yeah. And yes, some people have been pointing out the hair on these Capcom of those been a little noodly. And that did make us wonder like, wait, the hair is kind of the weak point in these high-end Switch 2 games anyway. Like what's Diana's like long blonde hair going to look like? Her hair is kind of a marquee of her character. She has this like long blonde hair. And like, yeah, the Amibo version of Diana's hair literally looks like spaghetti noodle. It's like dreadlocked of chunks of hair versus like the strands. On the PS5, like, I mean, this is a small little who cares, little thing. But like, it does the movement of the hair and the strands and the light on the hair. It's pretty impressive. Yeah. The Switch 2 hair gate, we'll see how it goes for poor Diana. Maybe she needs to go to the salon. Put on the hat. But yeah, break the hair. I don't know. So we'll see what happens. But look beautiful. Her hair looked beautiful on PS5. Yeah. Another great Capcom gate, but look forward to it. I'm seriously, I'm playing exclusively Capcom games on my Switch 2.

25:59A couple months, it feels like. Apparently, but like for reals though. Because I played Resident Evil 9 and then immediately played Monster Hunter Stories. And now I'm probably going to be wrapping up Monster Hunter Stories right when this game comes out. I'll just immediately go to this one. So until they stop making games, I'll be playing their games on a Switch 2. It's great. There you go. Yeah. All right. Well, hopefully you guys go check out the demo for a progmana on Switch 2. If you haven't already, super cool game, really encourage you to check it out and see for yourself. Hope you enjoyed this video and we'll see you later. Bye.