Open-world Soulslike goes viral for kicking so much butt that it lets you parry nuclear bombs

As a longtime parry proponent, it does my heart good to see Nier and Devil May Cry-inspired open-world action game V.A Proxy taking the art of the parry to extremes once thought unachievable: literally parrying nuclear weapons. 

V.A Proxy popped up on my radar earlier this month when creator PyroLith shared a short gameplay clip with a caption that I couldn't ignore: "Fuck it, you can parry nukes now." Sure enough, our helmet-wearing hero cuts clean through a nuclear blast using only a sword, before repeatedly reaching for his sheath in what I assume to be the in-universe equivalent of a teabag. Take that, nuke.

The horizon of this freshly nuked world is tantalizing, and the clip's quaking blast sound effects frankly didn't have to go so hard – no wonder the video's been shared over 33,000 times. V.A Proxy had me at "you can parry nukes," and this clip sent me down the rabbit hole of the game's Steam page. Tragically it doesn't have a release date yet, but the Steam page does offer a goldmine of more kickass clips. It's also got the Soulslike tag, which raised my eyebrow even further.   

V.A Proxy is billed as a "seamless hand crafted open-world" action game with a "mix of melee and range combat." The Nier influence shines through in the Pod-esque V-Unit support drones, the reclaimed machinery motif of the world itself, and the robot-powered, vaguely post-apocalyptic plot. 

"As time passed, the world continued to devolve into a further state of decay, and the once everlasting megastructure started to rot from the inside out, infecting most of the fauna on the surface," the plot summary explains. "S-units are very powerful and unstable type of machines. Awakened with most of their memories gone, they had no choice but to follow the breadcrumb trail left to them by their creators to unravel the mysteries of this world." 

I don't know if we're killing S-Units or we, the three machines at the core of the story, are S-Units ourselves – maybe both – but I'm down for the extreme speed and scale promised here. The art style reminds me of Risk of Rain and the presentation's definitely got some Devil May Cry vibes, but neither of those games let you parry nukes last I checked. 

Oh my god, I've just learned it's got a grappling hook too. Sign me up.

Speaking of parrying like your life depends on it (because it does): Elden Ring's Malenia has been modded into Sekiro, and it works unbelievably well.