The Steam Deck’s best button is its software

theverge.com:

The Steam Deck has a lot of buttons. There’s a D-pad, all the typical face buttons, two control sticks that also respond to capacitive touch and can be pushed down like buttons, two trackpads with haptic feedback that are also pressure-sensitive buttons, two shoulder bumpers, two analog shoulder triggers, and four buttons on the back of the device behind the grips.

Somehow, they all feel like they’re exactly in the right place while you’re holding the device, and in writing the latest in our long-running Button of the Month series, you might think that I’d wax poetic about just one of them. But for me, the true magic of the Steam Deck is that any button can be the awesome button, thanks to the device’s excellent software.

Take my experience with Cuphead’s new DLC, The Delicious Last Course, which contains a new gauntlet of mind-bogglingly difficult bosses. Like the base Cuphead game, Delicious Last Course requires fast reflexes and quick button presses to stay alive, and the Steam Deck’s highly customizable controls help the button pressing part of that equation.

During a battle, I usually keep my right thumb glued on the shooting button (on the Steam Deck, X) while using another part of my thumb to press jump (A). But when every split second counts, I found I was reluctant to lift my thumb even a moment to press the dash or special shot buttons. That infinitesimal break could mean the difference between surviving another barrage or dying and having to start a fight all the way from the beginning. With just a couple tweaks and 30 seconds in the Steam Deck’s menus, though, I changed the controls so I could jump, dash, and fire off special shots without ever having to lift my thumb.

I could have remapped the special