Thanks a lot for the help!
I might be misattributing the cause here - I’ve been fighting this for a couple hours, changed about a million things so by now I am a bit scatter brained.
But, yeah definitely something I did with the player controller there. Weird thing is that early I was messing with the “tick even when paused” and that was doing like what you’d expect - still allowing me to use the player controller despite being paused.