An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs
PC, Xbox Series
Strange Scaffold’s debut game has the feel of a runaway inside joke: a universe of far-flung airports, staffed and used almost entirely by stock photograph dogs. Their two-dimensional faces turn as you pass, and topple back if you run through them. There’s a dedicated pat button. A public toilet lined with fire hydrants. Bars serving toilet water. The canines loitering between the gates are called – wait for it – pedogstrians.
Airport brilliantly captures the ambience of a midtier departure lounge: tacky chain stores, omnipresent digital clocks, confusing signs, cheerfully useless staff. Go exploring and you’ll soon meet a unique NPC with an NPC-like problem – in other words, they need one specific object and they’ll be damned if they’re going to lift a paw to get it themselves. (The irony of being forced to complete fetch quests in a universe of dogs is not lost on us.) Finding the right pup paraphernalia takes up the bulk of your time. Some of these items are comedy gold in and of themselves; the delight of being handed something preposterously large ought to wear off, but somehow never does. How funny you find the conversations will probably depend on your tolerance for improv comedy. Sometimes the joke is that the joke
Developer/publisher Strange Scaffold Format PC (tested), Xbox Series
Release Out now
is overexplained. Sometimes the joke is the poisonous cycle of social anxiety and self-loathing as told through the life of a tiny Willy Wonka dog. And sometimes the joke is simply that there’s a planet called Uranus.
Your reward for completing a quest is often a fresh area to explore: a cat speakeasy, for example, or a pirate cave. But these lo-fi airports are awfully large, and the process of navigating them is time-consuming. You run yourself ragged sprinting across the hideous carpets, always either out of time or looking for a way to make it pass more quickly.
Still, that only makes it all the more authentic, really. These cumbersome systems feed into Airport’s melancholic undertone. Like Ursula K Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, this utopia is built on selective sacrifice. Note the cosmically traumatised puppy pilots drowning their sorrows between flights, or the blood pooled beneath the Marinara Trench. Note what happens when you try to call your mum. It’s a post-human world, and you are all alone here – except for Krista, the only other human in the universe and, conveniently, your fiancée. She’s your north star in every sense, a constant goal guiding you forward though this surreal existence. Where other games treat romance as a reward or an optional curio, Airport dares to put love at its centre. For that, at least, it deserves praise. And a treat. Perhaps even a belly rub, too.