No inputs work except in menus or dialog
After playing MEA Deluxe Edition 1.10 purchased on Steam for PC for maybe a month or two (186 hours, and two complete playthroughs with only a few minor issues), I saved and shut down one evening, and resumed the next day to find that MEA would no longer allow me to move the character. It doesn't matter which save file I load - even starting a new game or multiplayer game ends up in the same condition. The key that opens the menu (Tab or Esc or controller start button) opens the menu and I can navigate all the menus with no problems (mouse or keyboard or controller), but once I close the menu, no input goes to the character at all and all I can do is watch the idle animation. Notably, the mouse cursor appears and moves around on screen if I move the mouse. But no keyboard controls work, not even the hotkeys that would go directly to different menu pages like I->inventory, J->journal, etc. Only Tab (open menu) and the tilde key (open console) do anything. If I start a new game, I can actually make all the initial dialog choices and play until the point where I need to walk over to my twin's damaged cryo-pod, at which point I'm stuck unable to move.
I tried switching between full screen and windowed. I tried rebooting. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the game from Steam. I tried deleting all the Origin and Steam caches. I tried moving all of my profile and save files elsewhere to get a fresh start. Nothing has worked. I've tried EA tech support, but they've run me around in circles with no progress.
I can load and play other games that also use mouse and keyboard similarly (No Man's Sky or Satisfactory, for instance). So this issue is apparently specific to MEA. Yet it's not fixed by reinstalling it and deleting all config and save and profile files I know of. No windows or driver updates happened on the day it stopped working, as far as I can tell. It's frankly weird to have a game abruptly stop working like this.
Yes, I probably got my money's worth out of it, but I was not really done with the game. I'd like to try a few more builds and do a bit more exploring, so a fix would be appreciated.
I seem to have found a solution, though I'm not 100% sure of the details!
Because it sounded relevant and had a certain number of people complaining about it crashing, I unstalled Microsoft GameInput and stopped the service. That didn't fix the issue.
However, Windows seems to have reinstalled it automatically when I updated Windows 10 22H2 feature update to install (the process reappeared in TaskManager after rebooting).
I can't be entirely sure, but I can theorize that maybe, just maybe, Microsoft GameInput ended up corrupted and forcing a reinstall fixed the issue?
Either that, or something else in the Windows 10 22H2 feature update fixed a broken file.
In any case, I was just able to load a save game and run around after that update went through.