Thank you so much for your precious feedback!
Yes, you can use the crank to control the guns if you disable the knife from the options. In that case the monsters will damage you but will die right after.
It would be cool to control the knife with the d-pad. The only risk in doing so is that if I the knife becomes too easy to control then it can become too powerful. Maybe I can add a random miss/hit thing or add quite some delay between each swing (when using the d-pad). I'll think about it!