Found the answer on steam forums. There is a bug in that game where inputs get ignored.

The first cause is what I thought would be the culprit - some games have weird autodetection of control method, so if you have plugged in a couple of HID devices, they interfere with each other (esp. if analogue controls has some drift in it). Or the wrong one gets a priority and the desired device gets ignored/filtered out as a result.
The second cause was because of having dpi scaling set to other than 100%, as it probably messes up with composition and control elements. That sounds quite sloppy though.

I'm assuming HID means something like "Human Input Device" or something like that? Then yeah, that could explain the trouble I had with the controller. I am bedbound, and I have two hospital trays next to my bed. One one tray, over beside the bed where it's difficult to reach and sits stationary is one that my laptop sits on. On the other tray is a monitor, and it's tray that I use every day and move around. So, since the laptop itself is unreachable, I do have a USB mouse, keyboard, and controller (and though not an input device also plugged in is a USB headphone set) all plugged into it.

Setup seems to work fine with all the other games I've played. So far at least.

Yea that's what I meant, usually USB devices like controllers etc are listed as HIDs. It's not a problem to have as many of them as one needs, but some games acts funny if you have e.g. a flight stick and analogue gamepad plugged at the same time, where one is dinput and the other is xinput + an usb headset and each has its own utility software nowadays to boot. I had a couple of instances where I had to unplug the flightstick/pedals/wheel/etc, otherwise no joy.

I suspect the problem is likely that weird dpi scaling bug, which I've never heard of before tbh. But yea, the refund was well justified imo, esp. seeing as these bugs were reported in 2019 over on steam and are apparently still unfixed to this day.

I am glad for the policy of refunds after download. Some games simply do not work, as I have encountered. Only happened a couple times though. Games that just suck, I keep and then Hide them. Not gogs fault a game is not appealing to me. Why burn them for my self interest.