Controls & Accessibility

Touch controls

iPhone & iPad

Put a thumb down on the left side of the screen to steer with a floating stick; tap the round buttons on the right for your moves.

• The stick appears wherever your thumb lands on the left side
• Buttons: Dash, Shift (signature ability), Ultimate and your active skill
• Your virus fires on its own at the nearest cell it can see
• A pause button sits in the corner

Xbox, PlayStation, Switch Pro and MFi controllers work in runs and in every menu.

• Left stick or d-pad moves
• Default layout: A dash, B Shift, Y Ultimate, X active skill, Menu pause
• Connect any time, even mid-run
• No controller? “Pair one in the iPhone's Bluetooth settings” (or the Mac's)

Give each of the five run actions any of ten controller buttons.

• Actions: Dash, Shift skill, Ultimate, Active skill, Pause
• Buttons: A, B, X, Y, LB, RB, LT, RT, Menu, Options
• Picking a button another action uses swaps the two
• Reset to default
• Change it mid-run from the pause menu and it applies at once

Prompts show the buttons of the controller you're holding, in their real colours.

• PlayStation: ✕ ○ □ △ in blue, red, pink and green, with L1/R1
• Xbox: A B X Y in green, red, blue and yellow, with LB/RB
• Each in-run button wears the icon of the button mapped to it
• They switch to keyboard keys whenever the keyboard was used last

Every menu can be played without touching the screen: a spinning highlight moves between buttons.

• D-pad or left stick moves the highlight (hold to keep moving)
• A selects; B (or Menu) goes back or closes the top pop-up
• LB/RB (and LT/RT) switch tabs
• Left/right turns a highlighted slider down or up by 10%
• Map pins and continent labels get their own highlight shapes
• Locked items can still be highlighted to read what they need

With a controller or keyboard in use, a bar along the bottom shows what each button does on the current screen.

• Select, Back, Tabs and Adjust, each with the right icon
• Only shows the hints that apply right now

Any hardware keyboard plays: a Mac's, an iPad's or a Bluetooth one on iPhone.

• Arrow keys: move
• Space: dash
• W: Ultimate
• D: Shift skill
• A: active skill
• Esc or P: pause

Menus work from the keyboard too, with the same highlight as a controller.

• Arrows or WASD move the highlight (hold to repeat)
• Return or Space selects
• Esc (or Delete) goes back
• Q / E switch tabs (also [ ], Tab and Shift-Tab)
• Settings → Keyboard & Mouse lists every key

Steer with the pointer.

• Hold the left button and your virus heads for the pointer, at full speed once it's 90 pt away
• Right-click to dash

Every event in the game can be felt: each sound has a matching vibration through the Taptic Engine.

• Light taps for hits and pickups, heavy thumps for taking damage and landing, double pulses for rewards and warnings
• Rate-limited so rapid fire never turns into a constant buzz
• Vibration on/off in Settings (not shown on Mac)

One panel, reachable from the gear button on the main menu or the pause menu's Settings (a tab on iPhone, beside the run on iPad and Mac).

• Music and Effects volume sliders (70% and 90% by default)
• Vibration
• Language
• Controller (button mapping)
• Keyboard & Mouse (shown when a keyboard is connected; always on Mac)
• Scale to window (Mac)
• Everything is saved between launches

Play in English, Spanish or German, or follow your device's language.

• Choices: Phone, English, Español, Deutsch
• Numbers and dates follow the game's language
• The switch applies after restarting the game

With iOS Reduce Motion on, the game calms its busiest animations.

• The title screen's intro animations are toned down
• The Pandemic map's moving layers hold still: the night sweep, growing veins, pulses and the news ticker
• Buttons keep their labels for VoiceOver (Back, Settings, Resources, Modifiers)

New-mechanic briefings and confirmation pop-ups hold their main button for 3 seconds, counting down on the button, so a finger still on the screen can't dismiss them.

• Cancel buttons are never held
• A countdown (3, 2, 1) takes the button's label while it waits

Tapping something you can't afford or can't use yet shakes it and says why.

• A short reason pops up on the button
• A “denied” sound and a buzz
• Works the same with a controller's A

Progress saves on its own, moments after anything changes and whenever the app goes to the background.

• An Infect Game Mode run in progress saves every 3 seconds for the main menu's Resume: your traits, the organ's map, the rooms you cleared and the room you're in
• Abandoning a run puts everything back to how it was before the run started
• Resuming starts with a see-through 3-second countdown ("Get ready") so you can look around before anything moves; in a fight or boss room you hadn't cleared, you come back in by a door
• Each save file saves on its own; switching save files happens on the title screen, and a run in progress stays with its save file

The Mac version adds window scaling and its own game-styled controls.

• Scale to window: grow the interface with the window, or keep it 1:1 (sharpest on a non-Retina screen)
• Keyboard and mouse always available
• Game-styled sliders and switches in Settings