This game is incredibly malicious and pretty deranged. Everything from the opening slides that show the postal guys diary and how they betray his mindset is very fascinating.

But it's a shame though that during gameplay they don't reinforce this darker tone outside of the act of killing people, cutscenes, those opening level slides and THAT final level. Weirdly the voice lines and how the world is portrayed, it feels like postal 2 level goofiness. Which is a weird juxtaposition.

I kind of just get the vibe that running with scissors just wanted to make postal 2 but slapped on this edginess and cruel nature but decided not to go all the way and not explore these deeper themes of insanity and malicious violence.

postal is not a fun game. the subject matter itself is obviously enough to put most people off but even in it's actual gameplay it is repetitive, unsatisfying, janky, and at times simply frustrating. for me, it's hard to write this off as completely unintentional. unlike the subsequent and much more famous postal 2, this game takes it's premise of unmotivated mass murder completely at face value, presenting itself as a descent into madness not unlike a nine inch nails album or a von trier film with some pitch black humor thrown in not to entertain the audience but instead to make them even more uncomfortable with the actions they are committing. the inter level artwork of twisted bodies and demonic faces mixed with the dilapidated and dirty look of the gameworld gives everything this really disgusting feeling, a noxious vibe that i think gives this game the "survival horror" tag more than anything in the actual gameplay. the game's ending also gives it the real thematic gutpunch that level after level of senseless violence really needs, positing "going postal" as a reaction to the alienation and brutality at the heart of american society. it's not exactly a subtle, deep, or new idea, but it was an idea i wasn't expecting this game to try to pull off and i think it does so quite admirably. it's not a game that i would say i enjoyed or had fun with, but it's a game i respect for pushing itself so far so early in the medium's life, and being just so brazen in its own depravity.

full disclosure, the game crashed on me during the very last level and i lost all my progress so i just watched the ending on youtube lmao

oooooooh
4,5/10 - Length
4,0/10 - Enjoyment
7,0/10 - Perfomance/Bugs
6,0/10 - Story/Experience
4,5/10 - Gameplay

Score = 5,2/10

When it comes to the Postal franchise, the image most people have of it are these satirical shooters full of crass, crude adult humor with just enough ridiculously over-the-top ultraviolence to offend parents and prove inappropriate for the teenaged audience they carry the greatest appeal towards, without actually being anything to seriously worry about. While that is the path the property has taken from its second entry onwards, many would rather pretend its dark, twisted origins had never happened. Make no mistake, you’re not some comical anti-hero who can urinate on command here. You’re the unequivocal villain as you step into the warped mind and role of a mass shooter.

The game carries a suitably disturbing tone. At the start of each stage an excerpt from the deranged ramblings of the psychopathic protagonist’s journal is thrown onscreen accompanied by artwork straight out of a survival-horror title. During the moment-to-moment gameplay there’s no energetic rock music to pump you up for the action (or more accurately, the slaughter). There’s only the ambient noise and natural sounds of the environments you’re in mixed with the screams of your victims. You’ll hear the occasional one-liner tossed out as well, some of which I believe were intended to be humorous (“Stop shooting you sick b*stard! I’m already dead!”). I personally found it hard to take any amusement from them though, as my thoughts were too busy being an uneasy simultaneous combination of appalled fascination and repulsion at what I was doing. Running with Scissors wants you to feel uncomfortable while playing this.

I’ve experienced plenty of offerings like The Last of Us: Part II that have tried to leave you horrified at the violence they make you engage in, but none of them have proven as effective at that as this. The most interesting part is you don’t even have to kill everyone if you don’t want to. You’re only required to take out a certain percentage of the armed hostiles who are actively attempting to bring an end to your rampage before you can access the next level. There are usually a ton of passive, defenseless civilians running around you can gun down, but there is legitimately no benefit or reward for doing so outside of whatever sick thrill the more demented among us may get from doing so. You can’t stop them from occasionally wandering into your line of fire though, and with the way some scenarios are designed it’s as if the devs are constantly tempting you to engage in your most inhumanly evil impulses. Don’t be surprised to catch the intrusive thoughts asking you questions like “why not lob a Molotov into that line of people waiting to buy tickets at the movie theater? Why not launch a rocket into the middle of that passing parade? It’s just a game after all…”

There are a wide variety of movies out there which cover similarly harsh subject matter, such as A Clockwork Orange or Wes Craven’s original The Last House on the Left, and are difficult to watch because of it. Postal feels cut from that same cloth. It’s definitely more exploitation than arthouse, and as an interactive piece of entertainment it possesses undeniable faults. The obvious foremost being that due to the nature of the content it’s not very “fun” in the traditional sense, alongside smaller flaws including how it’s too easy to cheese the AI by standing right outside of their range of awareness while peppering them with bullets. Still, it manages to be noteworthy and carry a not insignificant amount of value regardless however, by standing as the closest representation of that class of cinema the video game medium has to offer.

8/10

A mindless shoot-them-up game for the whole family.

This game is nothing more than shooting people in the face, burn them, blow them up and pump their whole family full of lead. Easy and mindless but fun in a strange way.

You can play the campaign where you rampage trough different parts of the town, each time with a mandatory kill requirement. There are also many challenges you can complete. So, for its time, and still today, it is a huge game.

The game looks good for its time, the graphics and psychics are really well done, and the animations are fluent.

The sound is also surprisingly good with the constant moaning of dying people, the explosion sounds and the screams of people who are on fire. Yes, I can say this quite casually now because I also finished Postal 2.

For the time, this game was one big scandal and I can totally see why. Nowadays it is nothing more than a big shooting gallery where your only goal is to murder as much of the population as possible.

The reason I recommend this game is because the achievements make it fun to play. Normally after killing a whole neighborhood I am done with the game but the fact that you can achieve something makes it fun. Except for the “one million bullet achievement” of course, that one was sadistic.

Overall, it is free now so if you have a sadistic mood and some time to spend, give it a try.

i think this game is phenomenal. it was extremely violent for its time and it made some serious waves, mostly because of that. sure, its violent, but thats the whole point. postal shows you what a mass shooter on a rampage is like with zero glorification and what can happen if someone with mental illness doesnt get the help they need. the art direction is so good and so gritty and it fits so well. the ambiance adds to the experience, and postal dude is such an enigmatic character(especially when compared to his later iterations).
truly one of the games ever :thumbsup: