It's been a year and I'm still mad about the birds in Elden Ring

gamesradar.com:

I've never been a big fan of stealth games, or even optional stealthy approaches in action games, but I've always enjoyed the incredulous NPC reactions you get when you sneak up on a guard or henchman. Sadly you only get the best ones when you don't insta-kill them, and that's often the goal of the stealthy approach. There's just something comical about thumping some guard on the head only for them to stagger forward and exaggeratedly whirl around as they call for help or shout some threat or other. It's like the other side of an NPC losing track of you and deducing aloud that the arrow embedded in their throat must've come from nowhere – less absurd but equally extreme and decidedly NPC-like. But this reaction is less funny when you are the hapless character who's been thumped on the head, or indeed – to finally get on with the point of this article – stabbed in the back by a godforsaken bird in Elden Ring.

I was able to play one of the earliest network tests for Elden Ring, and my first hours in the pre-release Lands Between resulted in what is still my clearest memory from the entire game. It wasn't exiting the tutorial area and basking in that first open vista. It wasn't meeting the maiden and unlocking the magic horse. It wasn't even beating Margit for the first time. No, it was getting absolutely wrecked by the abominable knife birds in Stormveil Castle. I didn't know it at the time, but this would be the first step in a long tradition of avian assholes tilting me off a cliff. Behold, rare footage of my first encounter with these little bastards. 

(It is not lost on me that the randomly generated embed code for this GIF is "likable genuine att waters prairie chicken." I assure you, the prairie chicken is not