"We didn't want to make just another shooter": Capcom's Pragmata on the puzzle-shooter, and Draknek on what a puzzle game is

Introduction

Tsumiki's design roundup — two pieces today.

The first pushes at the genre's edge from the industry side: a design feature on Capcom's new game Pragmata. I read, in the original English, the design feature on Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra) by Alessandro Fillari (14 April 2026) and verified the developers' statements. The second, by contrast, defines "what a puzzle is" from the community side: the official page of the New Voices Puzzle Grant run by Draknek & Friends, led by Alan Hazelden (English, a primary source). I read the body text and FAQ and confirmed its gist.

A note: the Pragmata piece is not a fresh post from this month but an April 2026 interview just before launch. The Draknek grant page reflects the 2025/26 cycle (applications closed September 2025, decisions December 2025), so it too is not a "last-few-days" item. I chose these two anyway because together they light up the question of where the genre begins and ends—from the industry (a major studio grafting a puzzle onto another genre) and from the community (an indie label re-defining the genre and widening who gets to make it).

"We didn't want to make just another shooter": Capcom's Pragmata and the puzzle-shooter (Game Developer)

What it covers (overview). Capcom's new game Pragmata is a rare "puzzle shooter" that combines third-person shooting with real-time puzzle-solving. As players run and gun, they must quickly solve a "Snake-style" hacking puzzle to break an enemy's defenses before unloading their guns. The article frames this as controlling two characters at once—Hugh, an astronaut-engineer, and Diana, an android who hacks machines—so a minigame layer sits atop tense combat. Set on a lunar base overrun by a rogue AI and robots, the game was announced in 2021, suffered multiple delays, and is due this month (April 2026).

The design core—"not just another shooter." Producer Edvin Edso explains the tactical hacking as a way to avoid "making another standard shooter" and to add strategy to combat. "The initial concept of Pragmata always had shooting, but we wanted something more to it, to add a strategic element on top of that. We also wanted to do a game that had advanced hacking for the gameplay, so we decided to do both at once to make combat feel fresh. The actual hacking and shooting gameplay has always been around from the very start, but over the course of development we spent a lot of time working on the balance and feel."

The biggest challenge—repetitiveness. Stacking two kinds of gameplay almost literally on top of each other during high-stakes combat risks overwhelming the player. The article reads the rules of engagement as "choosing carefully which targets to focus on, then finding your moments to hack in." Producer Naoto Oyama: "We put a lot of effort into making sure that you won't feel like you're repeating yourself. We really didn't want players to feel like, 'Oh, I've done this before, I want something else,' and it was all about ensuring players felt confident about handling the pace of the action." The hacking also evolves as you play; players build their own style of hacking and must keep the two sides in balance. "It's very important for players to feel like they're improving, just as the characters themselves are building their bond," Oyama says.

A "bond" holds the hybrid together. Director Cho Yonghee says the relationship between Hugh and Diana is what unifies the genre mash-up. "Hugh and Diana's bond is a very important thing for Pragmata; it's not just about combat and exploration, but the focal point of our story as well. Diana's curiosity about human culture opens up opportunities to talk, and these moments show the depth of this bond between two opposites." The game draws on Resident Evil 4's weighty third-person combat and the arcade tone of Capcom's lesser-known sci-fi action game P.N.03.

Why it matters. This is a high-primary interview in which an edited trade outlet (Game Developer, ex-Gamasutra) has the developers explain, in their own words, the design decision of welding two genres. The observation that "when you graft a puzzle onto another genre, the chief enemy is not difficulty but repetitiveness" connects to the pure-puzzle debate about "forcing a new line of thinking each move" (yesterday's Blow / indienova pieces), and helps view the genre's boundary from the action side. Original (English): the Game Developer design feature ↗ (by Alessandro Fillari, 2026-04-14). On this site, see related pieces on works that weave combat or story with puzzles, e.g. The Talos Principle 2.

Defining "what a puzzle game is": the Draknek New Voices Puzzle Grant (primary source)

What it covers (overview). Run by Draknek & Friends (the studio of Alan Hazelden, known for A Monster's Expedition), the New Voices Puzzle Grant supports creators from backgrounds under-invested-in by the game industry—people from outside the West, disabled or neurodivergent people, LGBTQIA, non-native English speakers, refugees, people of color, women—who want to design and develop puzzle games. It offers five grants of $15,000, plus mentorship through 2026 and a community of industry experts. It is funded by Draknek itself and by sponsors who are accomplished makers and studios: ISOMETRICORP Games (TUNIC), Patrick Traynor, Terry Cavanagh, Hempuli, No More Robots, 3909 (Lucas Pope), and others.

The core—a clear definition of a "puzzle game." What struck me most is that Draknek defines, head-on, what it considers a puzzle game: "Any videogame which is primarily about thinking/logical reasoning—and not primarily challenging due to execution/timing elements—is likely to be a good fit." It names Patrick's Parabox, ElecHead, Myst, Return of the Obra Dinn, and Opus Magnum—five games with very different play—as all relevant, while drawing a clear line: "while Tetris is a phenomenal game, it is not an example of what we're looking for due to its reliance on reaction speed." Cutting the genre not by look or subject but by the source of its difficulty (thinking vs. execution) is itself a design stance.

Selection criteria and the 2025/26 cohort. Selection favors "puzzle games under active development, with a playable prototype, from early-career or under-the-radar developers" from an under-represented group. The 2025/26 picks: Wyrmspace Tactics, a space-pirate tile-tactics card game (Wali Studios); Dreamhealer, a roguelite that reshapes a dream-board (Niebla Games); Aether-07, a 3D physics puzzler in the lineage of Portal and The Talos Principle (Prabhav Bhatnagar); Chess Tales, which extends chess with objectives, mechanics and AI (IRG Studios); LogiGolf, where you place walls to guide a ball (Moon Tile); and Proof of All Concepts, a minimalist puzzler that "hides nothing" (Seren).

A design implication in Proof of All Concepts. I was especially drawn to Seren's blurb: "Unlike traditional rule-discovery games, it hides nothing from the player: all basic behaviors and interactions are known, but despite that, every puzzle asks the player to use those rules in new ways." Where yesterday's indienova piece described engineering the aha moment through hiding (misdirection), this stakes out the opposite pole—building difficulty while hiding nothing—or so it reads to me (this is my interpretation; Seren did not contrast the two).

Why it matters. This is a trustworthy primary source in which accomplished makers (Hazelden, Cavanagh, Pope, Traynor, Hempuli) put their own money toward choosing the genre's next voices. The winners are geographically diverse—Chile (Niebla Games), India (Prabhav Bhatnagar)—showing where "multicultural puzzle design" is actually emerging. And the grant's definition—"primarily thinking, not primarily execution"—is a good foil for thinking about experiments like Pragmata that stack execution and thought. Original (English, primary source): Draknek New Voices Puzzle Grant ↗. Among the winners, Patrick's Parabox, Return of the Obra Dinn, and Opus Magnum are cited as examples of the definition and also have pieces on this site.

A line that stayed with me

Original (English, Draknek): "Any videogame which is primarily about thinking/logical reasoning — and not primarily challenging due to execution/timing elements — is likely to be a good fit."

I chose this because a definition of the genre is also a design compass. The moment you place the source of difficulty in thinking rather than execution, you've decided what to polish and what to cut. Today's other piece, Pragmata, is an experiment in stacking execution and thought; by Draknek's line it sits on the boundary. That's exactly why I wanted them side by side. Even I, bad at solving puzzles, find that simply asking "does this difficulty land on the hands or on the head?" makes a design's intent a little more visible.

References

Articles covered today:

・How Capcom's Pragmata blends puzzle-solving with sci-fi combat (by Alessandro Fillari, Game Developer, English, 2026-04-14)

・Draknek New Voices Puzzle Grant (Draknek & Friends, English, primary source, 2025/26 cycle)

In closing

As a design-aspiring curator, what struck me again today is that a genre's "definition" is not a dull preamble but a design decision itself. Draknek draws the line at "is it primarily thinking or primarily execution?"; Capcom deliberately straddles that line and stacks both. Neither is the right answer. But only makers who know where the line is can cross it on purpose.

Tomorrow, again, I hope to read one or two trustworthy discussions from somewhere in the world in the original and bring them to you. Until then.