Flee, gentle reader, for she has come again! It's not too late for you to escape her: Horaszdóttir the Endless, she of the big boots and bear fur. Alas, our fate is sealed. She visits us every winter to split open turkeys from her eldritch flock, and soothsay our most anticipated game releases for the year to come.

She shows us many a game in those birds, reader, and we must impart the dread knowledge to you. We've already done strategy games; what hideous vision of the future is forced on us today? Ah yes, of course. It is the time of the storytellers, the quests and levelling, the congress with aliens. RPGs!

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As you may have seen earlier this week, I spent much of my downtime this month reading the official novelisation of Hideo Kojima's courier hiking sim Death Stranding. It was quite a strange experience, if only because so much of what I loved about the game wasn't present in the novels at all. The landscape you spend so much time analysing and assessing in Death Stranding is barely mentioned over the course of the books, and even the deadly BTs get surprisingly little air time for how often they seem to get in your way. But the strangest thing of all was how it depicted Sam's relationship with his jar baby BB, and it made me realise that all the weird, extraneous mess in its overall design is actually pretty darn important when it comes to establishing some of its later story reveals. I love a good game story as much as the next person, but when it's not supported by gameplay, something definitely comes a cropper.

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After the stylish multiplayer sandbox fighting of Absolver, developers Sloclap have announced a return to fisticuffs. Their next game is Sifu, a beat 'em up inspired by "kung fu film classics", starring a young student seeking revenge for the murder of his family. He'll be stylishly punching and kicking his way through a city, as you can see in the announcement trailer below.

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Sure, we did an animal-centric episode of Mystery Steam Review a few weeks ago, but horses are like the animal kings of the video game world, so these majestic bastards get their own MSR all to themselves.

For the next edition of Mystery Steam Reviews, we've run another poll on the Rock Paper Shotgun YouTube channel, so go and vote if you want to have a say in what next week's MSR is all about.

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It's strange seeing Five Nights At Freddy's grow from a simple jumpscare fest into a fully-fledged first-person horror game where you have to run and hide from deathbots, yet here we are. During Sony's State Of Play live stream last night, they revealed Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach would launch in 2021, and we got our first proper look at its gameplay. Players will be exploring a shopping mall at night, diving in ball pits and sprinting through closed stores to avoid being hunted by bloodthirsty animatronics.

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If you're into fighting big monsters with even bigger weapons then I have some good news for you. Capcom have confirmed that the Nintendo Switch action-RPG Monster Hunter Rise will arrive on PC early 2022. Rise will be similar to its beast-slaying hack and slash predecessor Monster Hunter World, with open areas to explore, though with slightly faster-paced combat this time. It also features little dog pals rather than cat ones, so it's absolutely on my watch list.

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Strategy and city building fans, rejoice. Humble have a new Build Your Own Paradox bundle that lets you save up to 88% on a variety of titles from the publisher's back catalogue. You'll need to buy three games or more to get the best discounts, but there's plenty to tickle your fancy, including Surviving Mars, Age Of Wonders: Planetall, Pillars Of Eternity, Imperator Rome, Cities Skylines and Battletech to name just a few.

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Magical forest adventure Kena: Bridge Of Spirits bagged itself a release date and a gorgeous new trailer during Sony's State Of Play live stream last night. This is the debut game from developers Ember Labs, and not only are they going hard on the lush visuals, but it looks like they also plan on making me feel lots of emotions. It arrives on August 24th, and you can get an idea of the emotions I'm talking about in the trailer below (spoiler: some of them are sad ones).

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The latest addition to AMD's RX 6000 family of next-gen Big Navi GPUs will be announced on March 3rd at 11am ET, which is 4pm GMT for us folks in the UK. AMD announced their announcement event yesterday afternoon just as eager graphics card buyers were rapidly hitting refresh on Nvidia's RTX 3060 cards, although whether this one will be any easier to buy is anyone's guess.

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On paper, Murder By Numbers is pretty much my dream game. It's a murder mystery visual novel (check) featuring lots of Picross-style nonogram puzzles (double check) with a soundtrack composed by Phoenix Wright's toe-tapping musical legend, Masakazu Sugimori (check check check). I enjoyed it a lot when it first came out last year, even if its actual puzzle images left me scratching my head more times than not once I'd completed them. There's just something immensely soothing about working out where to put your noughts and crosses in these types of puzzles, especially when it's surrounded by a fun cast of characters and an intensely catchy soundtrack.

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