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

If you're expecting a goofy, satirical FPS like its sequels, you might be shocked to find that the original Postal is a bleaker, more-depraved top-down shooter with a psychological horror theme where the goal is to eliminate police and millitary while optionally-slaughtering innocent bystanders that get in your way while a voice in the main character's head (who would later become the voice of The Postal Dude himself) spouts sarcastic quips and one-liners, making a joke out of the atrocities you're committing. The gameplay here's nothing to really write home about, but there are some provocative moments and memorable setpieces that stick with you.