Long Distance Love in An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs

Being in a long-distance relationship is hard, oftentimes excruciating. You learn to cherish the fleeting moments of time you have together, and find different ways to live your life around the distance. While it may not be obvious at first glance, An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs is a game about adapting to long-distance relationships, and the commentary it makes stuck with me more than most games this year, having spent five years long-distance with my current partner. 

Most of Airport For Aliens is spent wandering your way around various bizarre airports, all of which are run and inhabited by stock photo dogs. The premise is hilarious enough, but the game’s consistently strong writing really makes the personalities of the dogs shine. That is, of course, what’s going to draw the eye of most people. But if you follow the main objective you quickly learn that you and your fiance are the only two humans left in the universe. Even despite that fact, you only get to meet for a few moments at different airports, having to accept the weird new way the universe works. In these fleeting moments you talk about the strangest new dogs you’ve met, how her job is going, and how you’re going to make this thing work. 

In 2015 my partner moved to a different state to pursue a Doctorate in Veterinary Medicine, an intensive academic program by any measure. We’d been dating for a couple years already, but neither one of us were big fans of talking on the phone, video chatting, etc. I knew the distance would be hard, but I didn’t know how hard. Because of her program, we seldom had chances to talk during a normal week.

The way Airport For Aliens highlights the moments with your fiance felt eerily familiar to what I remember of the five years being long distance. Most of that time is a blur, but there are specific moments my partner and I spent together that I remember. Exploring an ice castle during the holidays, taking a weekend to go to a concert, and coincidentally for this piece, adopting a new dog. 

While there are only a handful of conversations across the game, it feels like some of the major points of a long-distance relationship have been boiled down to their core – the same way that I remember major moments from over the years. In Airport For Aliens, your fiance encourages you to go out and explore, learn new things and meet new, well, dogs. This reflects a hard truth about being long-distance: that you simply aren’t able to share as much of the things you love with your partner. What I really respect about an Airport For Aliens, however, is the optimistic outlook it has on this fact. 

In terms of gameplay, you’re spending ninety percent of the game exploring and solving the problems of dogs, and ten percent in dialogue with your fiancé. Yet, everything you’re doing in the game feels that much more meaningful because you know, at the end, that you’ll get to tell someone about it. That key fact was something that I finally realized after years of long-distance; that you can’t simply despair over the lack of time you get to spend with your partner.

I think many people in long distance relationships can’t help but feel like they’re being ignored.  I can’t deny that I felt pangs of envy, that I was stuck here doing nothing while my partner was off achieving her dreams. It’s easy to let those feelings overtake you, but An Airport For Aliens helps reinforce something that I learned after about a year into long distance.

I realized, you need to focus on the positive and use that time to discover new hobbies, new connections, that you can then share with each other. If you find something new to be passionate about, it makes those fleeting moments with your partner all the sweeter and gives you more to talk about when you can.

Long distance relationships can be especially hard because of the feeling that your partner isn’t there for you, supporting you when you need it, especially if it’s because of something like a new job or getting a degree out of state. Your fiancé in An Airport For Aliens has a vitally important job, one that could potentially fix whatever broke the universe in the first place. Instead of feeling neglected, however, your character is one hundred percent supportive of the job their partner is doing, encouraging them to give it their all at every step and pursue their dreams. 

I think there’s something just so compelling about An Airport For Aliens because of all this. You’re the last two humans in existence, and you spend all your time wandering around these cryptic airports, struggling to understand the signage and directions to make your next flight. The entire experience feels utterly surreal, and that’s really the point. 

Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but An Airport For Aliens practically feels like a metaphor for life. We spend our time stumbling through it trying to find purpose in a wild cacophony of noise. You meet a lot of strangers along the way, but there’s always that one person that can provide meaning to all that noise. 

An Airport For Aliens is such a joyously weird game, but it’s the heart underneath it all that really struck a chord with me. I honestly can’t think of any other game I’ve ever seen comment on the struggles of a long-distance relationship, let alone do it so well. So much of my own experience and feelings lined right up with the way the game portrays long distance relationships, telling me that someone on the development team has likely been through something similar. It feels strange to say that a game inhabited by stock photo dogs, with names like Chad Shakespeare, is one of the most relatable titles of the year, but it’s true, nevertheless.