And as players tend to do, they deploy them in ways that don’t seem entirely consistent with the game’s fiction. These fighters have voices – dozens of yells, utterances, and blood-curdling screams that the player can unleash with a couple of keystrokes. Thankfully, it also has a built-in release valve: its sound design. It feels great to stick an enemy with a pike and it feels like complete shit to die. When you’re actually playing seriously, though, the fighting is tense, demanding, and fraught with consequence.
But if you look long enough, you notice that their movements are just slightly off, that the gore and dismemberment doesn’t actually register as horrific – it’s more funny than chilling, almost like the Black Knight scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The enduring image of Chivalry is a grand, gruesome melee where grizzled fighting men whale on each other with swords, axes, and spears.
