gamepads won't work at all

[Romulator]

Only thing I can recommend is to take a look at Problem A4 of the SOMA Troubleshooting Guide for a list of applications which may interfere with SOMA. If you have any of these running in the background, consider turning them off temporarily to see if one of them is affecting SOMA from detecting your controller.

Have you also attempted to actually go into the settings and remap the controls that way? By default, I believe SOMA has pre-assigned inputs for an Xbox controller, but how the buttons are identified by input may differ to another controller. For example, I know a lot of gamepads use "Button 1" as an input where the Xbox "A" button is, which may use a different input altogether.