Experiencing PRAGMATA: No way worth more than $40
TL;DR: no, that play time is not a typo. It's not a long game at all. Despite that, it's still a slog with needless padding and excessive QTE.
Once we were able to acquire the game at its "fair" price (which is in the $40s at most) it was time to give it a try given good feedback at points.
It feels half-baked. Like it wants to tell a decently good story - but rushed due to how long it took to do the graphics.
Without spoiling: your team is exploring a station that is basically playing (insert deity here), creating life from inorganic matter that can essentially create homunculi - artificial beings that behave like humans. Upon arrival you're beset upon by walking automatons and a computerized voice ordering your destruction. Two of your crew are "removed from the premises" in a very tropey way, like a B-tier movie. The other - straight out of a bad horror flick - ends up separated from you, then you hear their blood-curdling scream as the voice has ordered their annihilation.
You see what was written there? Chances are you've seen some unscary film from the 90s that played out very similar. That's what you have here: a script that plays out like one of those terrible cult films, all the way to the "normal" ending.
To say more would effectively spoil a lot; suffice to say, your enjoyment of the game circles around whether you can suspend your belief at what's going on long enough to learn what happened. It's a tragic tale for sure, but a lot goes unexplained (in the cutscenes. There may have been some random reading somewhere that explained it - but we expect the game to explain it in the cutscenes).
During the learning of events you'll walk through various tunnels that follow a very cut-and-paste sequence: you open a door, there's some enemies that attack you, you go through another door, there's something that blocks you, you go through another door, you see something behind some glass that you have to then walk the long way around to find, etc etc. It got old. This segment felt very close to Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, where as you navigate a path you just hit these clearances where you know there'll be a fight.
Much was made of the hacking in order to deal larger damage than what is normally available. While creative, it also got old, and we weren't fans of the two situations where you're forced to do it. It makes sense in the context of the characters, but it felt needlessly burdensome; somewhat similar to Forspoken's final sequences.
One area is a badly generated downtown cityscape that looked quite nice; but was limited in its exploration. Graphics are almost never an issue in the game; it's a nice-looking game, certainly. Music was also decent (though repetitive).
So the story was decent, the graphics were good, the music was decent and the battle engine was decent.
Why then do we not recommend it?
Because there simply isn't enough here to justify anything more than $40 at a stretch. Even with all of the various items to find, even with the training stuff, even with learning about the world, it's just not "enough" of a game. Not when Clair Obscur which is arguably 4-5 times as long with a stronger story debuted at less than $50. We didn't really like Obscur that much, but we recognize it's superior to this in almost every way except graphics.