Transgressive art is art that is made to outrage in some way. It's in the name after all: the word "transgress" means to go over some kind of boundary, which in transgressive art, usually comes in the form of shock value utilized for the purpose to offend. In gaming culture, it seems there's a rush to justify the medium's nature as an art form by propping up more palatable and marketable titles that seek to have that arthouse flair or some form of cinematic sensibility, but if gaming is to mature as a medium, we must be able to acknowledge the ugly and the transgressive, and to do so, we can look no further than 1997's Postal.

I'll cut to the chase: this game isn't very good. The arcade-style gameplay is incredibly mediocre and drawn out way too long for its comparatively short runtime, and it really runs out of interesting gameplay ideas about a quarter of the way in. However, if I am being completely honest, the gameplay of Postal is the least interesting thing about it. The most interesting part of Postal lies in everything else surrounding said gameplay.

Despite the series' reputation nowadays, the original Postal does not look nor play the way you think it would. Your goal is to defeat a certain percentage of hostiles on each map, and while civilians can roam the map and flee in terror and get mowed down en masse, the game neither explicitly rewards or condemns you for doing so. There's the occasional morbid joke from an NPC, or a glib one-liner from the Postal Dude's inner monologue, but the "mass shooter" angle is played mostly straight. The atmosphere is top-notch as your rampage is backed by both the diegetic background noise and the occasional piece of droning, industrial ambience designed to unnerve you and really put you into the headspace of madness. Playing on Hard mode opens each stage with a diary entry from the Postal Dude, detailing his descent into madness and his penchant for violence as he believes himself to be on a one-man crusade against a supposed chemical attack from the military that is turning the townsfolk insane. The final mission is a cutscene of the Postal Dude attempting to shoot up a school (predating the Columbine Shooting by 2 years!) but finding his weaponry utterly ineffective at harming children, before he passes out and is finally locked inside a mental institution as a narrator reads off the definition of "going postal," ascribing his violent rampage to the mundanities of everyday life.

While the series' change in tone with expansion packs & future installments, and the direct quotes from Running With Scissors' founder Vince Desi claiming that the game was meant to be "really fun and fast, action-paced" would give the idea that the game's tone is intended to be humorous, the way Postal frames its violence is very purposeful and is not as fun or humorous as they may have intended it to be. One of the most common themes explored in transgressive art is that of mental illness and psychological dissociation, and taking into consideration both Postal's premise and conclusion, there's certainly more thought put into its themes and message beyond being a careless murder spree. Postal posits its violence as a product of contemporary society in a very unflattering, raw light that suggests a grander ambition than the comedic action game angle they claimed it to be (and would eventually fully realize with Postal 2). While Postal 2 went off the deep end of parody and was firing on all cylinders to be as offensive as possible on all angles, the more subdued, classical transgressive nature of Postal actually felt like it had something more meaningful to say, even if it wasn't entirely on purpose. Postal's controversy held up a mirror to the nature of mindless violence in society; the raw, brutal nature of it removing any glitz or glamor that the media would normally use to paint such violence with so as to be "entertainment." It's an experiment born of spite who's creation and ensuing controversy could only come from the minds of disgruntled former edutainment developers who wanted to make a real impact and push the boundaries of acceptability in the gaming landscape. Postal is an ugly, transgressive game that kind of needed to be made for gaming as a whole to mature as an art form.

So I had played through the base game of Postal 2 a while back and it was a game I had some very mixed feelings on. While I believe that it's a good, fun to play game with a great amount of replay value, the lack of polish in the gameplay, the buggy nature, and the sense of humor that has aged as bad as an awful take on Twitter, makes it a very polarizing game to say the least.

I never played the Postal games when I was younger, I completely missed out on them in favor of the PissStation consoles. I never was a PC person until just recently. Even back then if I was playing on a PC I was playing old DOOM games and old browser games. For some reason no one in elementary or middle school ever talked about these games, and after experiencing Postal 1 and 2 I actually don't understand why.

Postal 1 is just as controversial as Postal 2 if not even more so because my god, the tone of this game makes the second game look like cupcake shit in comparison.

[ 𝘼𝙏𝙈𝙊𝙎𝙋𝙃𝙀𝙍𝙀 ]

Right off the bat this game is MUCH darker than the later games, easily the darkest in the series. The moment you boot up the game your ears are assaulted by some loud horrific music and then after that your eyes might start oozing blood at the sight of the scary looking backgrounds. There is some very fucked up imagery here, it's almost like Satan himself made this game.

All of the loading screens have these very terrifying visuals that are hard to make out, followed by some twisted description of the level you're about to play on.

Funny enough, despite what I just said, this game still has a sense of humor. Not as on the nose like the piss and shit jokes and Arab terrorist stereotyping like in Postal 2, but a sense of humor nonetheless, it's just a lot more subtle in this game, like yeah, your parents and or grandparents are really not gonna get it.

This is a game about mass murder, and it honestly takes a lot of balls for the developers to take a subject as controversial as mass shootings and decide to be tongue and cheek about it.

Obviously just like the sequels, this game generated quite a lot of controversy when it first came out, being banned from several countries such as Germany, Australia, and Brazil.

American Senators? Oh ho ho, they despised this game, just like Mortal Kombat.

Obviously your parents should have the idea of raising you as a child correctly, teaching you the importance of discipline, responsibility, and what right and wrong are, and not judge your morality and what you do in your life based on shooting at pixelated graphics on a fucking 1996 CRT monitor but hey, who am I to judge eh?

cough Grand Theft Auto

Seriously, it's a video game, not polio.

But the Japanese? Nah, they fucking loved this game haha, so much so that they designed their own levels. Yes, you get to shoot up Tokyo and Osaka, Japan.

Though there is one part in the game that actually made me freak out because I thought I was going to have to shoot up a school at one point but that didn't actually happen.

I mean, I know this game came out before the Columbine shooting but Jesus Christ.

The subtle sense of humor is actually very effective because once you notice it then you can appreciate the game more for what it is.

Some of these fourth wall breaking moments made me crack the hell up in laughter. I'll share some of my favorites.

I was in the middle of shooting at a group of enemies and I guess I was shooting someone's dead body, and the dead body said "Stop shooting you sick bastard, I'm already dead!"

Or how about the stage where you shoot up a nursing home and the description says "Did someone say they've fallen and can't get up?"

Or how about when you throw a molotov cocktail and the Postal Dude says "You must be cold, lemme warm you up!"

Or some NPCs saying SpongeBob lines like "MY LEG!" or "MY EYES!"

Or how about the easter eggs in the Tokyo stage? There are buildings and billboards such as "Shitoba" which is a parody of Toshiba, and "GESA" which is a spoof of SEGA and it shows Sonic the Hedgehog giving a middle finger.

Shit like that makes me laugh. While yes this game is edgy and dark, it still has charm and a sense of humor.

This is how you do edgy games and not make a game like Hatred (2015), where the main character's only trait is that life is shit and nihilistic and that everyone should just fuckin' die, and says stupid shit like

MY LIFE IS NOTHING BUT COLD, BITTER HATRED in a Shadow the Hedgehog type voice and then proceeds to run into the middle of the streets and just senselessly kill everyone with no sense of rhyme or reason, with no prior development and or motivation to root for this character.

So it just comes off as too bleak.

And tryhard.

And dumb.

If you're going to make an edgy and bleak game you need to have some lightheartedness or sense of humor or some charm to mix it up and keep the game from being monotonous and desensitizing, because it does get old after a while.

The Postal Dude on the other hand is likeable because of his iconic character design and funny one-liners.

And another reason why this game works so well is because it is fun to play, which is a good segway to jump into the gameplay.

[ 𝙂𝘼𝙈𝙀𝙋𝙇𝘼𝙔 ]

This is an old school twin stick shooter where the core movement and gunplay is designed around strafing. You use the WASD keys for moving around, the mouse for aiming and shooting, and the number keys for swapping weapons. I would have preferred the middle mouse wheel but the number keys get the job done fine enough.

Moving and shooting is fucking ace in this game. Wherever the crosshair is pointing will determine the direction the Postal Dude is facing, and as long as the crosshair is in the general direction of the enemy, your bullets will hit them, even from all the way across the screen.

When this game first came out it had tank controls. Tank controls are suited for FPS games like DOOM, Quake, and Duke Nukem, but Postal is a third person shooter with isometric and top down perspectives, so having tank controls in a game like that just sucked.

Only until around 20 years later did the developers swap out the tank controls with just the standard up, down, left, and right movement.

Really, guys?? 20 years later??

Another thing that is jank about the controls is that there is a suicide button. Why? shoulder shrug I don't know, there isn't really a purpose for it besides to get a chuckle or two.

But by default it's mapped to the Q key, and there have been a couple instances where I'm in the middle of shooting bad guys and swapping weapons and then I accidentally hit the Q key and I blow my own goddamn head off.

And once you hit that key, you can't cancel it out.

Also, out of the 8 weapons, you can only move and shoot with three of them: the standard assault rifle, the full auto shotgun, and the flamethrower. All the other weapons (the pump shotgun, grenades, molotov cocktails, rocket launcher, and the napalm launcher) make you stand still while shooting them.

However, you should pick off targets whenever you can, because it's easy to get overwhelmed and bombarded with gunfire and explosions, especially on higher difficulties.

The assault rifle has infinite ammo but it's a pea shooter, and the full auto shotgun is an absolute fucking powerhouse but it burns through ammo quickly and has short range, same with the flamethrower.

The rocket launcher and grenades can kill anyone in one hit, however the blast radius is so small you'd be lucky to kill more than one person at once, so if you were expecting to use them for crowd control than prepare to be disappointed.

And the napalm launcher has short range as well, but it does have a large blast radius and any contact with fire equals instant death.

There is another thing that is pretty jank about this game. To go to the next level you have to kill 90% of the hostiles, which the game does conveniently tell you, but the level doesn't end right away.

When you kill 90-100% of the enemies, you have to push the F1 key to go to the next level. And at first I didn't know what to do after I killed all the enemies. I got this game off of Steam so I didn't look at a manual for it or anything. I only found out after looking in the controls menu.

But what really sucks about this game is getting stunlocked by rockets. When you get hit by an explosion you get launched into the air, but it's possible to get hit by another rocket or grenade while you're already on the ground and in the middle of getting up, so sometimes, this can go on repeat until you die. This literally happened to me on the first damn level.

So if you see a rocket tracking you, cause some rockets home in on you, for the love of God, hold down Right Click.

What I do love though is the difficulty customization. You get a slider that goes from 1-10 and you can tweak it to whatever you want.

I actually prefer this over the generic usual Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard, etc.

However, I played through almost the whole game on 5/10 and I honestly thought the game was too easy. You can soak up bullets like a sponge and the game is very generous with ammo and health pickups.

It's also probably because this game was originally designed with tank controls in mind, so having them swapped with modern mouse and keyboard controls kinda just breaks the game.

And this game isn't long. You can beat every level in the game in just 3 or 3 ½ hours. So I recommend cranking up the difficulty for your first playthrough if you want a genuine challenge, that's what I ended up doing, starting over but on a higher difficulty.

What this game also needs is some boss fights. There are none to speak of. Maybe something like a tank, or an attack helicopter, or a guy in a juggernaut suit, anything to spice up the game and break up the slight montonony of shooting at an endless amount of enemies.

Back then the developers were just a very small group of indie developers, and while they are still an indie studio nowadays, they're much bigger than what they were back then, which is all the more reason to put more shit like that in the game.

Because after I finished this game I honestly was craving more. The only rewards you get for playing through each of the levels are Steam achievements, and that's it.

But damn this game is fun to play. In a way, playing this game feels cathartic. Back then this must have been an awesome stress reliever alongside your GTA games or DOOM games or whatever.

Besides the main levels there are optional mini-games you can do as well, but they're just levels that you have already played before, except that you do things like killing a certain amount of enemies as quick as possible, capturing flags, and surviving until a timer runs out.

This does pad out the game a bit more but it's not enough to be honest. There is no mod support or online Multiplayer. Postal Plus actually had online Multiplayer but it was removed from the Steam version. There is LAN Multiplayer (Local Area Network), but no one in my area plays this game, so yeah.

So what I believe the biggest problem this game has is its longevity. Playing through everything this game had to offer in such a short amount of time made me want more.

The Redux version of the game tries to remedy this by improving the gameplay mechanics such as giving the full auto shotgun its own ammo type, adding in a new revolver weapon, increasing the rate of fire of the assault rifle making it less awkward to use, adding a score to the game, adding additional settings like the option to turn off bullet tracers, and adding a whole new mode called Rampage, where you kill as many enemies as possible under a time limit and every enemy you kill in rapid succession adds a multiplier to the score you gain.

But regardless, Redux is still the same game as the original, just with a new art style and additional gameplay tweaks. The game is still insanely short and doesn't have much to offer post-game. And speaking of art style, I shall talk about the presentation and why I actually prefer the original over Redux.

[ 𝙋𝙍𝙀𝙎𝙀𝙉𝙏𝘼𝙏𝙄𝙊𝙉 ]

Besides the horrific music in the beginning and loading screen backgrounds, the original 1997 release of this game is goddamn pretty. All of the backgrounds were actually hand drawn and it looks very authentic, it just reeks of a 1990s PC game.

It looks like I'm running around shooting at people in an old cartoon. I just love games that look like this.

The character models are very low res and don't have any facial detail. This game came out the same year as games such as Final Fantasy VII, Quake 2, and Tomb Raider II, but like I said, this was made by an indie studio so who cares anyway.

However, the reason why I prefer the original 1997 version over Redux, and this might sound a bit controversial, but I don't really like the artstyle of Redux. It just looks cheap. I prefer the hand drawn authentic aesthetics of the original over Redux which looks like it was computer generated.

So about the soundtrack, there actually isn't much to talk about because this game barely has any music playing. Most of the time you're just hearing the gunshots, the explosions, the shouting of the NPCs, the bird chirping and the wind blowing of the outdoors, and the tunneling ambience of the cavern stage.

It can add to the edginess and sense of humor, but good thing I have a SoundCloud account if I desire some music lol.

[ 𝙁𝙞𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙏𝙝𝙤𝙪𝙜𝙝𝙩𝙨 ]

A cult classic if I say so myself. It's great to waste an afternoon on and if you just want something quick and simple to play. The simplicity of the game's content does hurt it in the long run, but hopefully in the future the developers give the game the same amount of love as Postal 2 and we get something like mod support or Online support.

The game feels great to play, it controls like butter, it made me laugh while playing it without being insanely on the nose like Postal 2, it's edginess done the right way, I encountered no bugs or technical issues, I love how you can tweak the difficulty, and it's a pretty game for what it is.

And all of the controversy surrounding it only just made it along with its sequels more popular.

I recommend it, but whether the original or Redux are better than one another is up to personal preference, but regardless of which one you play, expect to be hungry for more.

7/10

Esp: Un juego corto de disparos, centrado en un sociópata que pretende matar a toda la gente que pueda antes de morir, este juego es precursor de mecánicas de GTA y algunos otros juegos de disparos, pero en su jugabilidad es monótono y en ocasiones aburrido, las pantallas de carga son oscuras, típicos pensamientos sociópatas, y el final es bastante siniestro, sin embargo todo lo que se dice alrededor del juego es lo único que le ha dado la popularidad que tiene hoy en día, sin esa "fama", este juego sería intrascendente y olvidado.

Eng: A short shooter game, focused on a sociopath who wants to kill as many people as possible before he dies, this game is a precursor to mechanics of GTA and some other shooting games, but in its gameplay it is monotonous and sometimes boring, the Loading screens are dark, typical sociopathic thoughts, and the ending is quite sinister, however everything that is said around the game is the only thing that has given it the popularity it has today, without that "fame", this game it would be inconsequential and forgotten.

What a weird game. Its not very good, really. The gameplay is just kinda bad all around and not very balanced. I would not of been able to beat this without the cheats.. and with how often it crashes + the overall overly edgy story and mid gameplay, it was a lot more fun that way too. It was free, anyway.

Achievement Completion - 56%
Time Played - 96 minutes
Nancymeter - 38/100
Game Completion #41 of 2022
April Completion #10