Controls and Keybindings Guide: Settings Tabs, Button Press Mode and Deck

How the Controls Work

The base loop is one skill: move with WASD (or a stick), hold the cast input, sketch the spell’s shape, release to fire — without stopping your movement. The sigil drawing guide covers that loop in depth. This page covers everything wrapped around it: what you can remap, the input alternatives, and the assist settings that change how demanding the drawing is. For the run structure those controls serve, the getting-started guide is the companion piece.

The 1.1.0 Keybinding Tabs

Before 1.1.0, input was largely take-it-or-leave-it. The 1.1.0 update added new settings tabs for keybindings covering four areas:

The announcement adds two things worth quoting: more settings will be added to these tabs in future patches, and the developers asked players to request additional options. This was the first patch to treat input as a settings surface rather than a fixed fact — if a binding fights your muscle memory, it is now yours to change.

Button Press Mode: Casting Without Drawing

Button Press mode is the most consequential alternative input: it replaces the sketch with a button press per spell. Two official facts frame it. First, it is packaged with the accessibility options — the game also offers slowing or freezing time while drawing — so players who struggle with the penmanship layer have a supported path, not a workaround. Second, it needed its own bug fixes: 1.1.0 “Fixed Button Press mode drawing hearts and triangles,” which tells you the mode casts shape-mapped spells (a heart is a heal, a triangle another effect — see the healing section of the getting-started guide). Assigning keys per spell is part of the mode’s setup, which is why it has its own keybinding tab.

One more input fact from the patch trail: the 1.0.5 hotfix added a tutorial for sprinting in the hub — right click or space. The mansion moves at a different pace than a run, and its movement controls are taught in-game since that patch.

Drawing Tablets, Mouse and Touchscreen

Three input devices are officially supported for the drawing layer itself:

• Mouse — the default, and fully sufficient.
• Touchscreen — supported natively.
• Drawing tablets — most work per the developer, with one known friction point: Wacom tablets may require disabling Microsoft Ink so the game can register pen strokes.

Tablet players get the most precise strokes, but there was one assist-related bug worth knowing: the 1.0.6 hotfix “Fixed Assist Mode that caused the wrong spell to be cast.” If a cast ever came out as a different spell than you drew on an older build, update before retraining your muscle memory.

Steam Deck and Handheld Play

The store page lists Windows, macOS and Linux, and the build carries SteamOS/Steam Deck support — the closest thing to handheld play until any mobile port materializes (nothing is announced; the mobile status page tracks that question). The 1.1.0 controller tab is what makes Deck play realistically tunable: drawn sigils plus a trackpad is workable, but remappable bindings are what turn it from a compromise into a configuration.

Sources

Official patch notes: 1.0.5, 1.0.6 and 1.1.0 (Steam news); Steam store page for platform facts and the launch FAQ’s tablet guidance. Screenshots © By Witchlight.