Going back.

In first-person games, I always rebind the jump to one of the back buttons. Coming from kbm, it weels weird that looking around and jumping at the same time is not possible.

I use my deck for ffxiv a lot, so I bound dpad buttons to the back buttons. In any game, if you try to move and use something on the dpad at the same time, it’s pretty rough. A claw grip is the typical way to handle this (Monster Hunter fans probably are familiar with this). This binding allows me to move and use dpad skills without hand cramping.

In games that don’t have good auto-save (like Skyrim), I’ll map one of the back buttons to quick save.

I use the back buttons as alternative shoulder buttons.

My right bumper button broke and I can’t find cheap replacement daughterboards, so bandaid it is. I can’t just solder in a new switch because the leads on the PCB broke. Seems to be a failure common mode for the bumpers if you ever hit the corner or drop it. The way the bumper is designed transfers the full force directly to the PCB instead of to the shell or any actual structural component.

Almost nothing. I don’t like how loud they are.

Some games have button layouts that make certain actions a pain. Two examples.

Horizon Zero Dawn - Healing is by default done by hitting dpad up. You generally want to press this button whenever you take damage to essentially trigger health regen, but doing so requires taking your thumb off the left stick, which means you can’t simultaneously avoid even more damage. Bind to back button, problem solved.

BallisticNG - Weapons are bound to X, discard weapons is bound to B, and accelerate is on A. So when you pick up a weapon, to discard/use it you either have to drop thrust (bad, never do that) or awkwardly shimmy your thumb to either hit X or B without letting go of A. Bind X and B to back buttons, problems solved.

I use the back buttons in Deep Rock Galactic to mirror the A B X Y functions. This allows me to jump for instance without taking my right thumb off of the stick. I have found this is super useful as I can be steering my POV while jumping. Took a minute to get used to but now I absolutely love it.

Rock and Stone, miners!

I pretty much never use them, don’t have the right hand shape and grip for it.

I’ve been playing a lot of Ziggurat 2 which is a roguelite fantasy-themed FPS with 4 categories of weapons. Instead of spamming Y to cycle through weapons, I can select my weapon directly with the back buttons.

I use them in place of the bumpers so my fingers can stay on the triggers.

flappy bappy wise the bottom ones are the joystick clicks, and the top ones are the shoulder buttons (i find my shoulder button pressed to be on the runliable side while using triggers)

YMMV, I treat it on demand, but in most cases it’s unused.

Civ: End turn

Driving games: Shift paddle

It’s like the 4th mouse button. Sometimes you don’t realize how much you might enjoy having it mapped.

So far the only games I’ve ever played on Deck that require them would be Portal 2 alongside the Portal 2 mod Revolution (or something along those lines). I think jump and maybe 1 other function is tied to the back buttons. Otherwise, I haven’t messed around with controls enough to find a use for them.

My default move is to map the L3 and R3 clicks to two of them. (I even unmap the actual stick clicks sometimes because I click them by accident a lot.)

I also find it useful in games where the situation changes and A B X & Y completely change what they do. Like if a game is mostly exploring but sometimes in a car/plane/spaceship/whatever, I’ll map the back buttons and use them when I’m in the secondary situation. (There’s lots of other examples of games that temporarily switch genres on you here and there and using the back buttons helps me remember the controls.)