🕹️ Pirates and vampires

🆕 On the Shelves

🤖👧 Pragmata

Developer: CAPCOM Co., Ltd.
Publisher: CAPCOM Co., Ltd.

Pragmata is a unique, sci-fi action-adventure game from Capcom. Follow Hugh, a member of an ill-fated investigation team, and Diana, a young android, as they navigate a lunar facility taken over by rogue AI in search of a way to Earth.

Pragmata has one of the most unique battle systems where you are forced to multitask your way through fights. You, the protagonist daddy figure, have standard weapons with which to take down the enemy droids: pistol, machine gun, shotgun, etc. However, at the same time, you have Diana riding along on your back, hacking into robots to make them pop open like faulty transformers. How this plays out on screen is a kind of Nokia 3210 snake game where you guide a line to the exit, stopping along the way to pick up power-ups and inflict more damage.

The game has been making the rounds on all social networks. For a variety of reasons.

First, Capcom sold 1mil units in its first weekend, which is a fantastic result for the company. Especially considering this is a brand-new IP for them—newsworthy, of course. Generally, reviews have been favourable sitting at 86 on Metacritic, and reviews on Steam are overwhelmingly positive as of time of writing. A big success for Capcom.

But, secondly, the game has attracted attention for some other, more sinister reasons. Kotaku writer Kenneth Shepard outlines one issue, starting the piece with:

The first time I played Pragmata was at Summer Game Fest 2025. After the demo, a colleague came up to me and asked what my reading was of Diana, the android made to look like a young girl. We’d only gotten to play around 30 minutes of the game, so I was honest and told her I didn’t have much of an impression of her yet. Then, like a baseball bat to my gut, she told me she was worried the character might be “pedo bait.”

Yeah, pedo bait… 

For me, I find it very hard to believe that Capcom would go out of their way to promote a game towards (checks stats in private mode…) 1.2% of the population (that’s the stat I got at least…). For me, Diana represents a lil kid that a much larger portion of the population (yes, males AND females) would want to look after. Occam’s Razor guys. Occam’s razor.

However, yes, some people did have to ruin it for gamers by posting inappropriate content related to the game on the r/Pragamata subreddit. Another Kotaku post outlines the story:

Reactions to the infantile appearance of Pragmata‘s android protagonist Diana on the r/Pragmata subreddit have prompted one of its moderators to publicly step down from their role, with them citing the overwhelming influx of “pedo shit” as the cause. Another Pragmata community has been shut down altogether by Reddit over inappropriate posts. 

The Pragmata community on Reddit has splintered into three distinct subreddits: r/Pragmata, the main subreddit, r/PragmataSFW, a self-described “attempt at building up a sub that isn’t plastered with pedophile dogwhistles,” and r/Pragmata_, which was just banned on February 18 for breaking Reddit’s “Rule 4.” For context, Rule 4 explicitly forbidsthe “sharing of sexual, abusive, or suggestive content involving minors.”

Another criticism raised against the game is that it continues a line of so-called “dad games.” Games where a capable male protagonist is paired with a vulnerable companion, often a young girl, creating a dynamic centred on protection, guidance, and growth (often, the emotional growth of the male protagonist). Games like The Last of Us, God of War, and Resident Evil 4 have helped solidify this trope as both commercially viable and narratively effective.

Of course, these games are fun, and an interesting narrative concept. The problem is that comparable “mom-centred” narratives (where a mother is positioned as the primary playable protector) are far less visible, particularly in big-budget releases.

This imbalance reflects broader assumptions within the industry about target audiences and which relationships are considered marketable. The “dad and child” dynamic has become a familiar template, while alternative caregiving perspectives remain under-explored. As such, the criticism highlights not a flaw in these games themselves, but a limitation in the range of stories the industry continues to prioritize.

🏴‍☠️🌊 Windrose

Developer: Kraken Express
Publisher: Kraken Express

Embark on a PvE survival adventure in the Age of Piracy. Fight on land and sea, solo or with friends. Build, craft and explore vast open world filled with dark secrets. Master soulslite combat and take on challenging bosses, command your ship and plunder unspoken treasures!

This is the biggest indie breakout of April 2026.

A pirate survival game with oodles of charm. The big selling point is the co-op mode which sees you and friends setting up a server similar to games like Rust and Terraria (though more like the former).

It launched in early access mid-month and immediately went viral: over 1 million copies sold in under a week, with peak concurrent players pushing past 200,000 on Steam. Those numbers are AAA, not indie..!

What’s driving it is pretty straightforward:

• Drop-in co-op chaos (like the game “Sea of Thieves,” but less polished and more unpredictable.
• A heavy focus on emergent gameplay which means players create their own stories rather than following scripted quests, something I am a BIG fan of and is evident in games like Rust, Minecraft, and The Forest.
• The kind of jank that actually works in its favor, which reminds me of the game series Just Cause.

📡 On the Radar

🔫 Saros

Sony Interactive Entertainment

Beneath the shadow of an ominous eclipse, Arjun Devraj (Rahul Kohli) is a Soltari enforcer who will stop at nothing to pursue answers on the shape-shifting Carcosa, a world of dark secrets and hostile inhabitants.

Master electrifying bullet ballet combat – intense projectile-focused gameplay with a unique, neon-infused esthetic – to overcome ferocious enemies and spectacular boss fights.

A third-person shooter that has strong roguelike elements and lots of action. From Eurogamer:

You know an action game has the magic when you come out of a sequence thinking “How the hell did I survive that?” 

The roguelike element means that each time you die and are reborn, you get experience points to use to power up your protagonist. This allows you to have one more run at that boss you just couldn’t beat on a previous run. 

Again, according to the Eurogamer article, Saros relies heavily on its mechanics to keep the player hooked, where the narrative part is less than perfect:

Saros’ action moves so fast that the rest of the game struggles to keep up at times.

As a fan of roguelikes, and as a PS5 Pro owner, I’m interested in this one, as I can have the full bullet hell spectacle running on my TV in 4k. No slow downs for me! 🤘

🍺 Nothing ever happens here

Developer: NoahsArkGames
Publisher: NoahsArkGames

A British life sim set in a real town, with a real Grandad at its core. Can you turn your life around, save his pub, and make something of yourself?

Having played the charming Thank goodness your here which also has a British slice of life (?!) vibe, I’m interested in this one as it offers a glimpse into my own upbringing. My dad used to play in a band—then a duo—in working men’s clubs around the county where I grew up, thus this one strikes very close to home. Though headlines write that the great British pub is in decline—the data shows that there is some stagnation—it’s not all doom and gloom. Pubs are slowly changing from “places where you go to smoke and drink” to eateries that are more open to a diverse clientele. Anyway, I’m getting a bit off-topic. 

According to a Polygon article:

“The narrative will cover themes of loneliness, isolation, the plight of the working class, British subcultures in 2011, coming of age… the core of the story is redemption. Your grandad is disappointed and appears cold, but he wants the best for you,” Somers’ explained. By doing up the pub and restoring it to its former glory, you’ll have the opportunity to make your granddad proud.

🍄‍🟫 City of None

Developer: Noel & Liam Berry, Extremely OK Games, Ltd.
Publisher: Extremely OK Games, Ltd.

A metropolis crumbles into ruin as powerful Barons satisfy their greed upon souls lost in time. You are but one spirit, with a wooden body left to rot in the wild…

Coming from the team behind Celeste. Gorgeous pixel art graphics and an 8-bit soundtrack. I haven't played it yet, but it has a strong Hollow Knight aesthetic (Yet, the term "metroidvania" is nowhere to be seen).

🎮 In Rotation

🤓 Vampire Survivors

Mow down thousands of night creatures and survive until dawn! Vampire Survivors is a gothic horror casual game with rogue-lite elements, where your choices can allow you to quickly snowball against the hundreds of monsters that get thrown at you. Be the bullet hell! 

Not a new game by a long shot—I’ve played it on both Steam and my phone—but I only just realized it has a co-op mode. That was enough of an excuse to pick it up again after finishing last month’s couch co-op game Reanimal.

My son and I have sunk about 20 hours into VS this month, and damn, it’s done some damage to my brain. I nearly got a migraine earlier this week, and I’m pretty sure VS was the cause. The on-screen flashing toward the end of a run is just insane.

But we can’t get enough of this “normal” game (a running joke in our house whenever my wife or daughter glance at the screen and think, “what the hell is going on?”). There’s actually a ton to do once you’ve cleared each level. The item evolutions are one of the biggest sources of that bullet-hell, dopamine-fueled chaos—taking a weapon from a rapid pea-shooter to a full-on Molotov-launching bazooka. And you can do this with four weapons each—eight beams of complete destruction.

The pacing helps a lot. Each level builds toward that 30-minute mark (and sometimes beyond 😉), with enemy waves growing larger and stronger, keeping the tension consistently high. And, the fact that each run is capped at 30 mins means that my brain and eye damage is only limited.