Postal: Redux is the remastered version of Running with Scissors's first game Postal, originally released in 1996. I bring the year up because I think the context for it is extremly important. Postal was originally released during a very turbulent period for media as a whole. It was published 2 years after the founding of the ESRB - which was founded thanks to the most part for violent videogames. Just 10 years earlier metal music was getting the same kind of attacks from christian reactionaries. Having congressional hearings, insane news stories, crimes of murder being blamed on the media, we know the deal at this point.

This isn't a review of mortal kombat, but it's fair to say here that the original mortal kombat was nothing to write home about. The violence in the game was a gimmick to get quarters and boy, did it get quarters. Its no street fighter II but mortal kombat was one of if not the most profitable american fighting arcade machine of the period. Controversy sells, so in 1996 Running with Scissors thought - what if we make the most ourageous game possible.

Enter Postal. Postal is a isometric and top-down twinstick shooter inspired by Robotron 2084. You play as the Postal Dude, a man who believes the Air Force has poisioned his town with a plague. You start the game off at the postal dudes trailer house with cop cars surrounding - and you are asked to eliminate 95% of the enemies. He intends to go to the source of the hate plague the airforce base. You end the game at a elementary school.

At least you do in the original. However in this rerelease they changed the ending due to - well the past 30 years of school shootings. But even then i have to say it was in poor taste as during the years of development there were five school shootings. In fact in doing mild research for this review, I found that in 1994, there was a mass shooting at a Air Force Base killing 4 people and injuring 22.

Postal's gameplay is not fun and I feel it's almost by design. It runs its course pretty quickly with every stage having the same objective - kill 95% of the map. In the map will be civilians that do not add or take away from this completion score. In most cases I think this game would be out of my mind by now. Yet it isn't.

Postal is by no means the cartoonish early 2000's libertarian satire that is Postal 2. Postal, I believe, is at its core a psychological horror game. I think it really comes down to the sound design and art of Postal. When you open postal industrial sounds are slowed and pitched down with screams surrounding to a muted beat.

The music for the loading screen of the first level is something straight out of silent hill. The sound of a voice slowed down to something you can not recgonize repeating over and over. The filtered out sounds of children laughing panning back and forth. The level after that? More laughter pitched out with drums, no rythm just echoing sounds of what I can only believe what hell sounds like. I could go on, if you play Postal for anyreason I think the sound track by Christrian Salyer is with out a doubt an achievement. Because in addition to the sounds of hell you visually get what it looks like. Very common you see a mouth screaming in agnoy warped and twisted along the screen. Behind it are grimy walls of cracking concrete. From the art of the cover of the redux alone I wouldn't be suprised if someone though postal was a videogame about killing monsters. These things tied together of ramblings from the postal dude ripped from his diary things like " A glourious symphony of Slaughter. 76 tromboners led the death parade" or "I will don the evisered organs of my enemies as party hats, i wear their shredded entrails as neckties, and oh, how I shall dance!". They all tie in to create a game that feels wrong to play. It gets under yourskin.

During the actual levels, there isn't any music. There is no action packed metal track to play underneath when you mow down a truck stop. The levels start with screams of fear and confusion and end with silence. Whimpers of people dying out - wanting to see their loved ones before they finally die. This game is not the power fantasy that is postal 2. Its almost an anti-game. Decades before 2010's era of "Killing is kinda fucked isn't it?" We had postal.

Postal won't get any high praises from me though - as I said earlier the game is extremly boring. Despite it's phenominal horrific atmosphere it doesn't save the game. While I took away from the game that the violence you create is horrific. Producing a sense of dread I haven't felt in a while - the game itself in truth doesn't really seem to have anything to say. The plot is as simple as I stated above. There are no twists or turns - the diary you get snippets of are just that - a diary of a violent man. There may be twists in the form of explainations of why the dude is doing the killing but - if we are going to be completely real here - it doesn't matter.

Postal is a videogame that was designed to be as controversial as possible. Running with scissors took advantage of the reactionary christian movement of the 90s to get free advertisement for sales. However, I think they missed the boat because in that time that group went on to worry about teenagers having sex more than violent videogames. I think being a little controversial however did end in the end help to get Running with Scissors some legs to stand on to develop the game that would end up being a mega hit for them - Postal 2.

I think it was extremly clever to use the try to trick the media into think it's a powerfantasy mass murder video game and make it something that makes it feels completly wrong. It just sucks its ends up being as deep as a puddle in terms of its messaging.

Its worth taking a look at - the source code is open source now meaning you can probably play it for free. I bought postal:redux on steam for 2 dollars though which was easier for me to do than looking into the open source thing. It's a very average videogame that sticks with you for a while.

Postal: Redux is a “mass murder” isometric shooter developed by notorious game developer Running with Scissors, known mainly for the Postal series, some of the most infamous games ever created. So of course a remake of their first ever game wouldn’t be too far fetched and was in development I believe around the time the Paradise Lost DLC was released for Postal 2 in 2015. Being a full remake in the Unreal 4, it has new additions as well as some changes while being faithful to the premise of the original. It was also surprisingly later ported to both the PS4 and the Switch of all things, fun fact. So how did I play this? I originally picked it up YEARS ago, specifically 2017-2018 because Postal 2 was the first full fledged game I had ever played on Steam, and as a huge fan of the series, why not pick up the remake to the first game? I played it sparingly, starting on April 9th 2017; finally finishing off the game last night because I was bored. All in all, it’s a short title but took me years to play through it, and here's why.

So what is the plot of this game? You don’t get much of a hint to the plot outside of loading screens and a cutscene or two. However, from what I can understand/research (Thank you TV Tropes/Postal Wiki), you play as the Postal Dude who believes that the Air Force has released a sort of plague upon his town, and as the only “sane” man, he feels he has to liberate everyone from the Air Force’s plans. What does this mean? Mass Shootings of course, killing everyone in his path to stop whatever is happening. In between each loading screen is a sentence or two, usually some edgy stuff about killing that clearly goes to show that this dude isn’t mentally there. After you go through the base game (and alternatively the free DLC packs which includes six extra levels), you end up at a church, where you witness a man beside a grave that’s being lowered into the ground. Afterwords, the Postal Dude levitates and passes out; only for him to then wake up in an Asylum, as the voice of Corey Cruise (from Postal 3 and Brain Damaged) plays the Psychiatrist who reads over the Dude’s diagnosis and declares that he probably “went postal” from the strains of being life. As far as I’m aware, that’s it; the main change I know of is that the final level in the original was apparently supposed to be a failed school shooting before the guy passes out. My thoughts on the story when first trying it out, I knew it wasn’t exactly going to be like Postal 2 but legit this is the darkest the franchise has ever been; there is no ironic humor like the other games, it’s pure edge and I’m glad the ending was changed. I assume due to the ending that the game just takes place in the Postal Dude’s head while the real world around him (in Postal 2 and on) falls apart. This is especially prevalent when while I was looking stuff up, it turns out that Rick Hunter (the VA for Postal Dude), is apparently labeled in the voice files as Demon, furthering the Dude into insanity though that was for the original Postal. Of course, this is all just my take due to research and piecing together bits and pieces of madness mantra from the loading screens so who knows. Overall, it’s ok though it’s not some genius art piece, nor does it intend to be; plus this game isn’t brought up into the others at all (though it does feature some in lore stuff like Krotchy Dolls and the like as Easter Eggs) so it could just be non-canon?

The gameplay is simple: shoot everyone (or almost everyone if you leave the civilians alone for an achievement) on a static map while picking up weapons/health items off of the ground before running to the exit and moving onto the next area. Weapons vary from the starter machine gun and shotguns, to rocket launchers and flamethrowers. Grenade types vary from actual grenades to mines and firebombs as well; apparently there are secret weapons that can be obtained with cheats but I don’t know as I haven’t tried them out. Also, after shooting people you can execute them, and whichever weapon you have equipped will be used to finish them off though this doesn’t provide any benefits as far as I’m aware. That’s just it, there’s no real interactivity other than that; though I will point out that in certain buildings there will be NPCs that spawn whether it’s another armed cop/soldier or an unarmed civilian. There’s also a cooperative mode which I have yet to play (though it hosts a new ending) and a sort of challenge mode where you try to rack up a high score. I guess the truth is, there’s not much else I can say about this other than there are difficulty levels.I guess I could throw in how to get cheats: press T in game and then type in certain phrases and you’ll be able to unlock stuff. I’ll find a list of codes and post them as that’s how I unlocked the Hatred guy for the screenshot and for verification but otherwise a short and one note game and it works just fine.

So what is the art design and the sound design like for this game? I’ll say that the art design is pretty damn solid. Each level in the game for the most part is a solid painting of sorts, updated with a new coat that feels a lot more…full. Though I’ve heard some people say they prefer the original because its more minimalist nature feels a lot more oppressive. I argue that while that may be the case, it doesn’t stop the game from feeling eerie anyways in its atmosphere. Regardless though they’re all the same maps (minus a few added in) but with a little more flair added to them. Another thing I like is the contrast between the PC with certain environment pieces, like you always run at a solid pace while other things like a church bell as an example runs at a lower frame rate, which to me continues the dreamlike nature of the game. The sound design for the most part is ok, the voice actors are decent with the main Postal Dude and the Psychiatrist at the end being played by veteran Postal actors Rick Hunter and Corey Cruise, who do a pretty good. There isn’t much in the way of voice acting otherwise (unless you count the unlockable Hatred PC) that doesn’t consist of screaming and dying but they’re all decent and don’t break immersion. If I were to find a fault with any of them, I’d say it’s that sometimes the weapons feel weak (or at least the machine gun and the shotgun) but they work just fine otherwise and in an ironic sense provide a level of detachment from the Postal Dude’s reality.. Finally, the soundtrack (contained in the loading screens) itself is grimy and unsettling and feels like it comes out of a nightmare hellscape, sometimes consisting of loud noises and percussion and other tracks (like Home) consisting of ambient whispers and screaming.

Final thoughts are that it’s decent, content aside; whereas in some ways I can respect Hatred’s ability to be over the top with the awful dialogue and camp, I feel like this game is better at conveying the horrors of someone who's gone mad and conveys the mood in a bit more of a subdued manner (if you could call this game that). The gameplay might feel a bit stale and repetitive, but I feel in terms of sheer remake standards that whatever the first Postal felt like, it did decent at capturing that feeling, updating everything while keeping it as faithful (as I could see anyways) to the original. I wouldn’t recommend it for casuals, nor would I play this game often due to the content; but one day I’d come back to wrap up the achievements and go through coop for the exclusive ending and at a usually low price of 8.99 or 3 dollars on sale, it’s not bad to pick up for around 3-5 hours of content.

https://postal.fandom.com/wiki/POSTAL_Redux

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/Postal

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2531841727

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2068702768

https://postal.fandom.com/wiki/POSTAL_Redux/Cheats

From Steam Reviews: https://steamcommunity.com/id/gamemast15r/recommended/