Are you having trouble playing Sauna on your PS1/PSX? Does the camera start spinning like crazy and you can’t even enjoy the game? Then you’ve come to the right place.
Before jumping into the solution, let’s add a bit of context. Sauna is a homebrew project for the original PlayStation released in May 2025 by Zhamul. It’s quite a curious little project, as it was created using PSXSplashEdit, a tool that allows developers to build levels in Unity and export them so the PS1 can render them. The result is a very short experience (just a couple of minutes) where you explore a small sauna environment, but it’s surprisingly interesting from a technical point of view.
Now, the problem. Some users have reported that as soon as the game starts, both the camera and the player begin spinning uncontrollably. At first it might even look funny, but after a few seconds it becomes frustrating… and in the end, you simply can’t play the game.
The good news is that the fix is very simple. There are two ways to play the game properly. The first one (and the more authentic option) is to burn the game to a CD-ROM and run it on a modded PS1 with a real analog controller. But let’s be honest, that’s not the most convenient solution (but the coolest one). I imagine that if you're here, it's because you've tried running the game on an emulator and are looking for a solution within the emulator itself. Anyway, you have a short tutorial here to burn this project in a CD-ROM.
The easiest way to play it is to use an emulator like DuckStation. The key thing to understand is that the game requires the analog mode to be actively enabled. Even if your controller is already set as analog in the emulator, that’s not enough and that’s exactly why the spinning happens.
To fix it in DuckStation:
- Go to Settings.
- Go to Controllers.
- Go to Controller Port 1 and check Controller Type.
- It must to be set to Analog Controller.
- Then, assign a button to the Analog option (for example, Enter) below the image of the control.
- Once that’s done, launch the game and don’t press anything at first.
- As soon as you see the camera start spinning, press the analog button you assigned.