Pragmata's New Demo Shows Promise For Full Playability On Steam Deck

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At the last couple of events I went to this year, I had the pleasure of playing Pragmata behind closed doors. I fell in love with the game, utilizing a creative and engaging way to hack enemies to lower their defenses with some great third-person shooting mechanics. Combine that with the great premise and sci-fi setting, and it feels like this game was made for me. While I was able to play the game before, a public demo was just released, giving us a chance to check it out at home, and more importantly, on our Steam Deck.

So, I downloaded the demo and tried it out on the Deck. And honestly, I was very impressed.

Before I go into it, consider this a preview. Demos are usually smaller slices of games that don't have all the content or optimizations the full game may have. Because of this, performance may differ in the full release, but with this demo, we can get an idea of where it will be.

The demo itself is very short, and I finished it in about 12 minutes. It takes us through a couple of fights, shows off the hacking, and culminates in a boss fight where we have to utilize multiple different weapons and take this giant robot down. It was all very familiar to me, mostly due to having played through this part 3-4 times in the past, but I got to experience it on the Steam Deck, which made it all worthwhile.

At the default settings, which are a combination of Low shadows, high texture filtering, and high anti-aliasing with SSAO Ambient Occlusion, I was able to stick above 30 FPS the whole time, with a majority keeping above 40. This is with no upscaling at all, and turning on FSR 3 at Balanced brings the small drops below 40 FPS, bringing it all the way up to 50. It still can drop below 40 in the boss fight when all the missiles are being fired at you, but it will stay upwards of 45 FPS with FSR 3.

Still, I would say this shows the game should be very playable on the Steam Deck regardless. It stays pretty high above 30 even without upscaling, and it may be possible to get a solid 40 with it. It would be great if we could get to 60, but having a high base framerate does pave the way for lossless scaling artificially boosting the framerate to 60.

Still, with how it's performing in the demo, I am quite confident that the full version of Pragmata should be playable on the Steam Deck. There's enough room for extra performance, and I can see it carrying over to the release. I can't wait to find out for myself!

Pragmata can be pre-purchased for $59.99 ahead of its full release on April 24th.

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