"Put David Cage on a leash" is a appropriate award considering the allegations against him.
You pointed out in the beginning that the controls feels like it was meant to a gamepad, and you are not off the mark here. This game first came out to the Playstation 2 and the original Xbox, so that might explain your feeling about the controls.
As for the game, I think one problem of this game is it boils down to David Cage not knowing how to "kill his darlings". The core aspect about it being a murder mystery where you play through the point of view of both the criminal and the investigators is actually quite good, even with the supernatural involved, but then it carpet bombs it's premise with rogue AIs, matrix slapfights, zombie sex, and the list goes on... I think if it toned down the supernatural elements (by having Lucas only gaining the ability to see the future and not the "jedi" powers, for example) and removed the rogue AI plot, it would have enough elements to focus on creating an interesting story. But then again, it's "one" problem. After all, it's David "Judge me by my work" Cage we're talking about.
And speaking of David Cage... Well, even though you gave a plausible excuse to not be much aware of him, I don't think it's enough because hearing about him once in a lifetime can go beyond playing is games, especially depending on your stance on "videogames being art". One reason being that he's infamous for advocating a lot for the videogame industry to "grow up" and become more "mature" with it's storytelling (and even became a darling to many game journalists because of that), and he's also infamous because he was memed a lot by people with functional braincells because, to put it frankly, his games are the complete opposite of what he tells the industry should be.
Where I want to get at is that Indigo Prophecy is not a one-off. It may be a one-off on general batshit insanity, but plenty of the writing problems do carry over to his future games (I've heard that one reason for Detroit for having better writing in comparison was because the actors that played Connor and Hank improvised against David's wishes). I think I will try to stay vague for now, because I want to see your reaction towards the rest of his games, but I will finish with this: The best way I can sum up David Cage writing is that he writes like a 14 year old that recently discovered about the concept of pathos and pop culture and thinks that "boobs + heavy themes + stuff from his favorite movies" automatically makes a "mature" story. Also, others summed him up as "Hideo Kojima, but stupid".
I'll also left these gifts for you when you eventually check out the rest of his games, they will be useful on the journey ahead:
(on a sidenote, if anyone is interested in seeing this experience, I recommend checking out the Super Best Friends let's play of this game, and they also did every David Cage game)