If the controls didn't show up you may have been suffering the same bug as a lot of other people, it's ok. one thing is that i tested my build of the demo before uploading it and it only seemed to work with xInput devices, dInput didn't work. i wan't to make sure that they work in the future but it's not a huge priority.
Well getting parried in your game is like in sekiro, in dark souls and elden ring getting parried is a huge deal, and in my game getting parried will be pretty rare actually, most enemies will block without parrying you, so there's that.
about the ganks, i plan on doing two things, one is to let the player get out of it in some way by cancelling some animations or something like that, i'm not super sure yet. the other is that i might make enemies not attack at the same time often, they'll kind of pace themselves to not overwhelm the player too much.
the gun and absorb indeed do not work, don't worry. The absorb will be for manually sucking in the souls of dead enemies around you but i'm not adding that feature yet for quite a while.