ENTRY 11: THE KNIGHT (Tarhos Kovacs)
"A nightmare to behold with longsword in hand, many have fallen to The Knight’s unyielding fury. His Guards – The Jailer, The Assassin, and The Carnifex – obey his commands with unwavering loyalty. Use them to patrol routes, deal with obstacles, and steer Survivors directly into your blade’s path."
LORE SUMMARY: as an actual dark-ages European knight, Tarhos had a life packed with blood and gore and plague and torture and misery. He becomes obsessed with the secrets of an ancient artifact said to open a gateway to another world, imprisoning and torturing his own prince in his attempts to unravel its secrets, which he never would. He became a feared warlord who would kill thousands of people before the fog came for him, and once he saw the entity's realm, he felt he had finally found the paradise he'd been pursuing. Or something like that!
LORE SUMMARY: as an actual dark-ages European knight, Tarhos had a life packed with blood and gore and plague and torture and misery. He becomes obsessed with the secrets of an ancient artifact said to open a gateway to another world, imprisoning and torturing his own prince in his attempts to unravel its secrets, which he never would. He became a feared warlord who would kill thousands of people before the fog came for him, and once he saw the entity's realm, he felt he had finally found the paradise he'd been pursuing. Or something like that!
I do like how absolutely any kind of character can turn up in this game, and the idea of a knight in a slasher horror scenario is such an entertaining one, I'm disappointed there isn't a knight based horror film franchise. It would be fun as heck to have something like Friday the 13th set in the dark ages with a relentless unkillable knight mowing down the whole court.
He's not just a clanky man with a sword, though; his gameplay gimmick is that he's still accompanied by his three most faithful guards, and while playing the knight, you can actually deploy the three of them as NPC's to patrol the map! The three guardsmen are:
"CARNIFEX" (Sander Rault) a big burly guy with an axe, who can quickly break some of the objects survivors use to their advantage. Only his his lower face and rotten teeth can be seen through his heavy leather hood, which doesn't even have eye holes, but it does have two giant, circular metal emblems that give the impression of huge eyes, and together with the pointed tip of the hood where his nose is, it kind of gives him a big owl-like face.
"ASSASSIN" (Durkos Malecek) this guy can inflict survivors with a "deep wound" status effect, which progresses to the "dying" state where all they can do is crawl on the ground; same as when the Killer manages to hit them a couple times. The assassin appears to be burned all over, with corpsey flesh and barely any hair, wearing a red bandana over his nose and mouth.
"JAILER" (Alejandro Santiago) this guy doesn't have any special abilities, except a longer patrol path and twice the duration of activity as the other two. He's also the scariest looking, a noseless and lipless ghoul with sharp teeth shards of metal throughout his body.
BEST SKIN(S):
"PERMANENT INJUNCTION:" a fairly unsettling suit of armor, with a helmet designed like a pair of hands are covering the eyes and another pair are sprouting out the top like antlers. It's described as armor his lord forced him to wear, so I guess he didn't like it.
"EREDIN'S END:" one of a couple suits that give him a skull face, which is an obligatory option to begin with. This one looks the coolest, with a crown of long metal spikes around a helmet with just the upper skull present, metal ribs down his front, and underling leather armor designed to look a little like muscles and tendons!
"ENCHANTED PLATES:" of his multiple skull head options, though, all of them appear to just be stylized helmets except this one, which is clearly an actual rotting, mostly fleshless corpse held together by jagged, spiky obsidian-like armor plates with glowing, presumably necromantic runes! You'd think he'd have a few more outfits that look "magical," honestly. This is a very nice start, but I'd like to suggest a skin that's just an animated, hollow suit. That's classic! And what about a headless one?!
