Toward the end of 2025, I was catching up on one of the games I had enjoyed most throughout the year, but hadn't managed to play a lot of. Hell is Us is a nostalgic third-person action game with design philosophies taken right out of the 90s and early 2000s. For a brand new game from a small studio, it has an almost "retro" feel to it because it doesn't hold your hand or give you the waypoints, maps, and lists of quests that we're used to in the modern era of game design. And I couldn't have chosen a more appropriate PC controller to play it with than the 8BitDo Pro 3.
This PS1-inspired pro controller has a similar identity to Hell is Us in many ways. It looks to bring back design ideas that were commonplace 25 years ago and show that there's still value to them beyond a retro charm. Even the rubberized, horizontal bars that the Pro 3 uses for pause buttons feel like they've been tuned to the finest detail to call players back to their PS1 roots. All the while, TMR thumbsticks and four additional buttons bring this controller into the modern era.
