Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: soundtrack album
Info
Yasumasa Kitagawa is a composer who after graduation started his career at Konami, where he worked on mostly sports games (which isn’t too out of the ordinary, Konami makes a lot of sports games so a lot of Konami composers have worked on sports games). After a little over ten years there he moved on over to Capcom, where he’s been ever since doing a bunch of random stuff. The only soundtracks of his I really know are the Ghost Trick remaster, Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, and The Great Ace Attorney 1 & 2, none of which I enjoyed very much honestly, but PRAGMATA’s a much different game from all of those so I gave it a shot.
PRAGMATA is a sci-fi action adventure game where something weird’s going on at a Moon base and you’re a technician sent there to figure out what’s going on. But that’s not why anyone cares about this game, the reason it got buzz is because it’s the Space Dad simulator where at the start you find a six-year-old robot girl and then immediately do the “I’ve only had Diana for a day and a half but if anything happened to her I’d kill everyone in this room and then myself” meme in real life. Most of the soundtrack is electronic, a mix of dance tracks that one would assume are for the action bits and ambient tracks that one would assume are for the atmospheric bits. There are also a few emotional solo piano or piano + electronic noise tracks, and we can imagine how those fit into the dad part of the game.
The thing that stood out to me the most as I listened to this is that there’s a whole bunch of (sometimes very subtle) random polymeter or pseudo-polymeter in the more active electronic tracks. Most of the time it’s fairly simple, like having a four-beat riff on top of 3/4 or stacking a 3-3-3-3-4 rhythm on top of straighter 4/4, but there are some thicker-sounding instances and some odd time parts as well. Some composers do just like to randomly throw in polymeter and I don’t know if Kitagawa is one of them, but even for them there’s an awful lot in this soundtrack, so my conspiracy theory is that it was an intentional compositional decision to reference the fact that in combat you have to multitask and act with two characters simultaneously. I have no idea if that’s actually true, but I hope it is, and if it’s just a coincidence, well there’s a free idea for all you music directors out there 
I’m on vacation until next week so I’ve been listening to this soundtrack on my cheap earbuds and not my real headphones, and I think that’s done it a disservice because I can tell that the production and sound design are real nice, but I can’t tell quite how nice because I’m not getting the best quality audio into my ears, so as I write this I’m not sure whether we’re talking “yeah this sounds great” tear or “holy hot damn” tier. But at a minimum, it’s pretty nice! There are a bunch of pretty standard EDM sounds making up a lot of the tracks, but they’re combined with lots of good synths for arpeggiated riffs and pads and a lot of effects to keep things fresh. The more ambient tracks flex some sound design chops more, there are some very cool noises in a few of them.
This is my favorite soundtrack of the year so far! It reminded me a little bit of the Einhänder soundtrack in its rhythmically-playful and good-sounds techno style, if Einhänder had polymeter instead of odd time. PRAGMATA’s definitely nowhere as harmonically surprising as it so don’t go into it fully expecting Einhänder Zwei, but I dug it a lot.
Recommended tracks:
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“To The Moon” is a bit mysterious-sounding
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“Overdrive” switches to triple-based time signatures in the second half after starting in 4/4 (starting with a 7/4 riff polymeter before going to a 6/4 one)
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“False City Dweller” is the track that made me go “okay but seriously what’s up with all the polymeter” at 1:19
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“Saturations” has a bunch of crunchy detuning
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“Obstructor” shows off an angular, syncopated rhythm of a kind this soundtrack drops a couple of times
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“Resolve” was my favorite of the ambient sound designy tracks
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“Recall” is one of a couple of examples of actual odd time in this soundtrack (naturally there’s a very basic bit of polymeter in this too with the two-beat riff that comes in at 1:32)
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“Judgment” was my favorite of the piano tracks, and it’s obviously because it has some real loud synth noises in it too
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