I'm sorry to hear you weren't able to get the controls working properly! What type of controller are you using? and did Steam happen to be open while you were playing? When we were trying to get it working with PS5 controllers, we discovered that the inputs would get modified/consumed by Steam running in the background.
I also had to manually map the raw inputs to get PS5 controllers working natively, but each type of controller has different mappings that will need to be individually implemented (even the PS5 Edge controller doesn't work with the normal PS5 controller mappings). Please feel free to submit feedback or a bug report from the links included in the game folder, and hopefully we can get it working for you!