Capcom Is Releasing Three Games Next Year, And I Played Them All at Gamescom

By Alyssa Mercante | August 21, 2025 | 9:30am

Video Games Features Gamescom

Capcom Is Releasing Three Games Next Year, And I Played Them All at Gamescom

In 2026, Capcom will release three wildly different and highly anticipated games: the samurai action game Onimusha: Way of the Sword, the sci-fi shooter Pragmata, and the survival horror title Resident Evil: Requiem. Fans are waiting for all three upcoming titles for a variety of reasons, as well: Pragmata has been trapped in production status for years, Requiem is poised to shake up the Resident Evil franchise, and Onimusha is the first mainline entry in the beloved series in nearly 20 years.

So when I got an opportunity to go hands-on with all three titles at Gamescom 2025, I jumped at the chance (though I already played Pragmata at Summer Game Fest, this demo had a little extra at the end). Each game offered a different kind of challenge, and with the time limit for the demos set to 30 minutes each, playing all three back-to-back was like a gamer gauntlet.

Here’s how they went.

Pragmata

I welcomed the chance to play through the Pragmata demo again, as it was my favorite game I played at SGF this year. The sci-fi shooter introduces a nuanced and clever hacking mechanic that requires you to dismantle attacking robots’ shields by using the face buttons on your controller to navigate through a grid, avoiding red squares while strafing to also avoid bullets.

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Pragmata has other hacking mechanics that are all based on using the face buttons, like rapidly pressing the correct buttons in a specific order or using those buttons to rotate on-screen shapes so that they line up correctly, both of which can unlock doors or provide access to elevators. But the fun that comes from hacking enemies as they run directly at you is the best part of Pragmata: that feeling of panic as a floating drone-bot fires rounds at your face makes for some truly frenetic fun, and doesn’t feel like anything else I’ve played recently.

The last time I demoed Pragmata, it wrapped up right as a giant robot boss dropped down onto the map. I was annoyed, I wanted a taste of the boss. This time around, I got to have a go at him—and maybe I should have been grateful I was spared the boss’s wrath a few months ago.

This early-level Pragmata boss, the SectorGuard, takes the framework of the hack-and-shoot mentality and ups the ante. It slides across the map in an almost unavoidable dash and shoots missiles at me that, despite telegraphing their location, I struggled to avoid. My weapons, which were more than enough for every other enemy beforehand, felt like they were barely making a dent in its metallic hull, even though I was successfully hacking it every time I was prompted to. Diana, the small robot child who accompanies you (and is essentially a 3D-printed robot who does all the hacking), would loudly warn me of its incoming attack, but to no avail, as it repeatedly swept in and hit me while I was mid-hack.

Crucially, I still had fun as it beat my ass, a testament to the core gameplay loop Pragmata has to offer. Until the boss, the demo only throws enemies at you in twos or threes, and it can feel kind of easy, which initially had me concerned that Pragmata might struggle to scale its hack-and-shoot mechanic.

But the SectorGuard and its chunky health bar and masses of missiles assuaged my fears—I expect late-game Pragmata fights will be pure chaos.

Resident Evil: Requiem

The Resident Evil: Requiem demo drops you right into the fray: Grace Ashcroft (daughter of Resident Evil Outbreak’s Alyssa Ashcroft) awakens hanging upside down on a gurney, attached to a machine that’s slowly drawing her blood. She breaks free, and you take over—I decide to play in first-person mode to ensure maximum scares, but Requiem will allow players to swap between first- and third-person for the first time ever at launch.

The demo is short, but leans heavily into Resident Evil’s survival horror roots. Grace isn’t a veteran federal agent like Leon Kennedy, and Requiem wants you to remember that at every turn. As I creep around the seemingly abandoned Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center, Grace’s terrified breath and the occasional suspicious creak provide the only soundtrack. The space is small, but Grace moves slowly through it, which makes searching for a key or a spare power fuse all the more painstaking. When I open a door and a corpse tumbles out, I jump, even though I watched a Capcom employee play this demo a little over a month ago.

And when the terrifyingly giant monster lady appears moments later, her bulging eyes so close to the camera that it felt like they were peering through the screen at me, I jumped again. That brief hesitation allowed her to swoop Grace up and take a nice mouthful out of her trapezius meat, and when I turned to run away, Grace’s painfully slow speed made me start to panic.

For the next 15 minutes, I stayed in this fight-or-flight mode, my adrenaline pumping as I tried to navigate this small space without rousing whatever the hell that monster is. She’d slither down from a hole in the ceiling just as I would start to go down a hallway, forcing me to retreat into a room, extinguish the lighter shaking in Grace’s hand, crouch down, and pray to a God I don’t believe in.

At one point, I could hear the monstrous thing sniffing in search of Grace, and I nearly screamed out loud. I managed to hold it together and get Grace to what appears to be freedom, only for that thing to drag her back down a dark hallway before the screen faded to black.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword

Onimusha: Way of the Sword is a delightful (but still somewhat demanding) action game that’s a welcome reprieve from punishing Soulslikes. Protagonist Musashi Miyamoto is forcibly bequeathed with an onimusha gauntlet that gives him the power to collect souls and see flashbacks in Malice-infested areas to better understand this supernatural evil plaguing the lands. Tasked with clearing the Malice from the world around him, Musashi has to fight infected human-like figures wielding swords and bows, floating, bodiless demon heads that spit nasty muck, crocodile-like baddies covered in spikes, and even another onimusha-wearing samurai.

Combat is straightforward in Onimusha: Way of the Sword, but not simplistic. On a PS5 controller, triangle does one-handed attacks while square does two-handed attacks, and a well-timed L1 lets you block or parry incoming attacks and deflect arrows. A well-timed parry leads to a special flourishing attack, and Musashi can even block attacks from behind—at one point, I was facing the wrong direction when an enemy took a swipe at me. I panic-pressed L1, and Musashi effortlessly reached his sword over his shoulder and behind his back, blocking the incoming strike. If you manage to strike an enemy just as they’re trying to hit Musashi, he’ll perform a huge Issen counterattack that will make the enemies drop more absorbable souls.

Though I found all of the mechanics to be quite easy to understand and execute, by the time I got to the demo’s boss (the flashy and flamboyant Sasaki Genryu, also armed with an onimusha bracelet), I realized Onimusha is no walk in the park. Sasaki’s fast strikes and giant jump attack took chunks out of my health bar, forcing me to better time my parries and avoid spamming buttons to try and pepper him with a flurry of strikes.

Of course, as soon as I started to get Sasaki’s timing down, the demo ended, but I see a lot of promise in Onimusha, especially for fans of action-adventure games who are looking for their next foray into the world of the samurai.

Alyssa Mercante is a freelance video game and internet culture journalist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been featured in Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Jezebel, Kotaku, and more, and she regularly streams on Twitch.