My D-Pad Works Fine In Menus But Does Nothing In One Game

This is a controller question with a software answer, and it has a specific technical cause worth knowing.

A D-pad can be reported to software in two different ways. Under the standard gamepad mapping that XInput and the Gamepad API use, it is four separate buttons at indexes 12 to 15. Under the older DirectInput convention it is a hat switch, a single control reporting one of eight directions plus centre. Both are perfectly valid and your controller is reporting the first one, which is why our test shows four clean directions.

The problem arises when a game only implements the other convention. A game written against DirectInput looks for a hat switch, finds none, and the D-pad simply does nothing, while sticks and buttons work because those map across both conventions. The game's control settings will still show the D-pad as bound, because the binding exists, it is just pointed at a control the game never receives. That exactly matches your symptom, including the misleading settings screen.

The fix is almost always Steam Input, which can present your controller to the game in whichever form it expects. Enabling it for that one game translates the four-button D-pad into a hat switch the game can read. If the game is not on Steam, adding it to Steam as a non-Steam game and launching through Steam gets you the same translation, which is a well-worn workaround for exactly this.

It is worth doing this per game rather than globally. Changing the setting for every game to fix one of them tends to break something else, and Steam's per-game controller configuration exists precisely so you do not have to.

If toggling Steam Input both ways makes no difference, the next suspect is the game reading only the first controller it finds, so unplug other HID devices such as wheels and flight sticks and try again.