GAMES

CELESTE, NS, PS4, PC, XBO

Madeleine wants to climb a mountain, and screen-by-screen that's what you help her do, jumping and air-dashing and climbing to solve each miniature puzzle and get to the next one. The premise may be simple, but the result is extraordinary thanks to superb controls, smart and inventive design, gorgeous pixel art, killer music and a touching, relatable story. Celeste is, overall, an incredibly thoughtful game. It nails its fundamentals so well that they become the medium through which the story is told. Madeleine's self-doubt becomes a wraith that mirrors or mimics you along your path, threatening to catch and obliterate you. An overwhelmed hotel owner self-destructively fills his beloved building with dangerous detritus. Story-telling aside, Celeste is also a triumph of game design. It's challenging without being elitist or exclusionary, with each (frequent) death teaching a lesson players can harness to make it through the screen.

FREE-TO-AIR

SQUINTERS, FEBRUARY 7, ABC, 9PM

Created by Adam Zwar (Wilfred, The Lowdown) and Trent O'Donnell (The Moodys, No Activity), this six-part comedy features a massive Australian cast. They're all employees of goods dispatch company Kosciusko, but we don't see many of them interacting, or even at their workplace – the series is made up of vignettes featuring the characters on their daily commutes to and from work. Delivery driver Paul (Tim Minchin) has conned Romi from marketing (Andrea Demetriades) into car-pooling with him. Frustrated middle manager Lukas (Sam Simmons) is there with his mum Audrey (Jacki Weaver in fine form). Stressed single mum Bridget (Mandy McElhinney) has an obnoxious teen daughter Mia (Jenna Owen) with a boyfriend Vj (John Luc). IT worker Ned (Steen Raskopoulos) carpools with former schoolmate Macca (Justin Rosniak), a bong-smoking forklift driver who's lost his licence and who once bullied Ned at school. Macca and and Talia (Rose Matafeo) are trying to make enough money to open their yoga-wine bar, Cabernet Shavasana. Sort of like a mobile incarnation of The Office, it's a new take on the workplace comedy with a distinctly Australian feel; the calibre of actors lifts it above the standard sketch comedy program.

DVD

HOME AGAIN (FOX) M

Hallie Meyers-Shyer is the daughter of writer-director Nancy Meyers, whose glossy chick flicks aren't always as conventional as they appear. Judging from Meyers-Shyer's first feature as writer-director, the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree. The setting is the affluent side of Los Angeles, where the 40-ish heroine Alice (Reese Witherspoon), recovering from a marriage break-up, finds herself playing den mother to a youthful trio of aspiring filmmakers (Pico Alexander, Jon Rudnitsky and Reid Scott). Though Alice doesn't fall into bed with all her new house guests as her equivalent might in a French film, the implication is that they amount to the perfect partner split between three bodies; as in Meyers' The Intern, the blatant anti-realism can also be taken as a statement about what men ought to be like but aren't. There are countless corny moments, but the premise is sufficiently original to bring many of the cliches back to life: against all odds, Meyers-Shyer even manages to find something moving in a climax involving a character racing against time to attend a child's school play.

STREAMING

FORTITUDE, SBS ON DEMAND

It seems at first like another Scandi crime thriller, but this is a British series set in the fictional Arctic Norwegian town of Fortitude. And there are some extra elements at work in this slow-burn drama, not least of all polar bears. The settlement, with a population of 773 people, acts as a microcosm of the world, with an international community of scientists, naturalists, artists – and a couple of cops, unaccustomed to any real crime, even though it's "law" that everyone carries a gun in case of  polar bear attack. When the town experiences its first real murder, that of a local scientist who may have had a lead on a significant archaeological find, sheriff Dan Anderssen (Richard Dormer) has to work with British DCI Morton Caldwell (Stanley Tucci) to solve the crime. Before we even get to this (Tucci doesn't appear until the second episode), we're slowly immersed in the community – among them the grumpy, dying photographer Henry Tyson (Michael Gambon), the "governor" Hildur (Sofie Grabol), and husband and wife Jules and Frank (Call The Midwife's Jessica Raine and Nicholas Pinnock) – as well as many of the inhabitants' secrets. The pace is as glacial as the landscape (the series was shot in Iceland) and there are a few red herrings along the way, but the foreign landscape and the town's strange inhabitants (there are hints of Twin Peaks) are strangely hypnotic. Seasons one and two are available now.

CLASSIC

THE FAN (Shock) MA

Robert De Niro has never quite won his battle to be viewed as a comic actor, but he has a unique gift for portraying a certain kind of stupidity: stubborn, self-righteous, wedded to cliche. Those qualities are to the fore in this 1996 thriller, where he plays yet another variant on the psycho character that has sustained him through much of his career: an outwardly law-abiding knife salesman who spends his free time obsessing over baseball and one showboating centrefielder (Wesley Snipes) in particular. Faced with professional and personal disaster, he graduates to stalking and worse: the homoerotic implications are stunningly blunt, especially when Nine Inch Nails' Closer shows up on the very 1990s soundtrack. Stylistically this is as overwrought as you might expect from the late Top Gun director Tony Scott, all filtered light and off-kilter camera angles. But it's a reminder of an era now in the rear-view mirror, when Hollywood was capable of turning out medium-budget thrillers with visual texture, interesting actors – the supporting cast includes Ellen Barkin, John Leguizamo and the young Benicio Del Toro – and no pretensions to prestige.