I love postal 2, I'd say it's one of my favorite games of all time even. When I got Paradise Lost on sale for $0.99 I was excited because I recently finished Postal 2 and I watched the Pro Postal series made by Civvie 11 on Paradise Lost and I went in with high expectations.

now my actual thoughts on this is it's just alright. I didn't really have as much fun with it as Postal 2 and honestly it just feels kind of shitty to play. I like postal 2 for its mundane plot with batshit insane situations that go on, but with PL, RWS probably got such an ego boost from the overwhelmingly positive reception that they got the idea "people love our shit, we're the shit we must be geniuses when it comes to story-writing and jokes since postal 2 is being praised for it" or something like that. I just think everyone who worked on PL thought that they could make anything and it would be good. I may be completely wrong but that's the idea I get from playing this.

As I previously said this feels shitty to play, navigating the map feels harder and more of a chore with some roads being blocked off and needing to go underground adding just a few seconds of travel was just unnecessary and there's just too much shit in my opinion.

The objectives are also fucking atrocious, it’s been a while since i finished PL but i just remember not liking most of the tasks very much

I also think the game looks worse. I don't know why but the textures just look uglier in my opinion. I don't have much to add on that other than i dont like the way some things look

Also rick hunters voice for the dude is off putting because its not as deep as it was in Postal 1 or 2 and it just isn’t the same i don't know uhh anyways Paradise lost kinda sucks in my opinion

YIIK is one of those games that for better and (mostly) for worse is going to leave the player speechless. It blurs the line between what is being done deliberately to annoy and frustrate the player and what is actually just a bad idea implemented terribly. It's a game that's endlessly fun to talk about, but actually playing through the game is an exercise in patience. Its inspirations are obvious and plentiful, but they don't do anything interesting with them. It takes so much of its time to say things to the player, but in the end doesn't say anything of interest.

The story starts off simple enough; Alex Eagleston comes back home after graduating from college, and very quickly gets himself embroiled in the disappearance of a woman named Semi Pak (or Park, the game appears to not pronounce this name correctly). The first thing the player is going to notice is how fucking wordy this game is. Alex keeps constantly monologuing about stuff that is only tangentially related to what's happening. It gets tiring very quickly and it never stops. I get that Alex is meant to be unlikable, but the worst part is that its verboseness is not a trait unique to him. Everyone just does not stop talking, and they just keep going on and on and on. This has the undesired effect of making the story difficult to follow, since the game throws so much uninteresting dialogue at you that you start to mentally check out. You get the impression that the devs would have rather written a book than make a game, which isn't terribly surprising seeing as they've often cited the works of Haruki Murakami as inspiration for the game. Deciphering what's actually happening in the game is the hard part, but the actual themes of the game are pretty easy to grasp. Themes of self-improvement and standing by your friends are pretty obvious, but they aren't very convincing coming from our main character, who doesn't seem to change all that much throughout the game. Also, the fact that he has any friends to begin with is hard to believe in it of itself, but I digress. The story is easily the worst part of the game and is the main reason why the game is as infamous as it is.

That isn't to say it's the only thing bad with it. The gameplay might be the worst I've played from a JRPG, and I've played quite a few of them. For reference, I played this game after the combat rebalance patch they put out, and if it actually improved anything I'd be terrified to know how the game played beforehand. The combat takes inspiration from the Paper Mario and Mario and Luigi games, where your attacks will have inputs that you can do to increase your damage. The main issue with this is that you have to do the minigames if you want to do any sort of damage, and they are way too long for what they are. It also doesn't help that battles themselves last forever. A battle with random enemies can easily take several minutes to complete, where in a better game they wouldn't even last a minute. The game would probably be several hours shorter if they made regular enemy encounters take a reasonable amount of time to beat. I get the feeling that they didn't playtest their own game, because how one person plays it and comes out saying "Ya, this is perfectly fine" is beyond me.

The only thing I'd say that succeeds in any sort of capacity is the soundtrack and art direction, and even then there are some massive caveats. The character portraits are generally well drawn, and the main cast have some pretty appealing designs, but it's held back by some characters having only a handful of expressions, making some scenes play out very awkwardly. I generally like the games' art style, and some of the dungeons can be quite nice to look at. It feels like one of the few things that had a lot of thought put into it. The soundtrack has some decent tracks to them, with Alex's theme being an especially catchy music. I was actually surprised to see his leitmotif used pretty frequently throughout the game. Unfortunately, the soundtrack also comes with a lot of bloat. The game has an ungodly amount of battle themes, and the quality of them vary wildly from pretty good to unlistenable garbage. It reminded me of Shin Megami Tensei V, in that that game also had a ton of battle themes. But unlike that game, where it spread out its battle themes and placed them in appropriate parts of the story, YIIK just throws them willy-nilly in any battle, regardless of context. This makes it that these themes just blend in with each other and lose any sense of identity they have. Even when the game succeeds, it finds a way to fail in some way.

I played YIIK because it was a game that fascinated me from the outside looking in because of how people talked about it. I'm still debating whether it was worthwhile to play it. There were moments where I was trying to figure out what the author was going for, if a certain narrative or gameplay choice had purpose behind it, or if they were simply doing a bad job. With the I.V story update coming soon, I might get a better understanding of what they were trying to go for. Or maybe it'll be a similar exercise in futility.

I've flip-flopped back and forth between saying "I genuinely like this game" and "Postal 2 is only good as a guilty pleasure" for a few years. In truth, this is a game that's hard to classify. Is it trying so hard to be offensive that it ends up being a bland exercise in poor taste, or does that bad taste coalesce into something more compelling? Having played through Postal 2 multiple times, I can sense a whiff of some social commentary, but anything profound you take out of it is an unintended side-effect of the climate in which it was produced. Strangely, that makes it so this winds up being one of the most fascinating PC games from the last twenty years. Postal 2 has aged so poorly that it's wrapped around to being a genuinely interesting piece of history--which is weird to say about a game where there's a dedicated button to unzip your trousers so you can pee on pedestrians. But really, no other period in time could produce something like this. If Postal 2 was made nowadays, people would say it feels like a cute throwback to 2003.

The question is: now that the shock factor has worn off, is it worth playing nowadays? I think so. Postal 2 harkens back to the origins of the Open World format. The whole "build a massive world and copy-paste everything" formula wasn't there yet, mainly because the technology to back it up wasn't, either. Instead, older games took the idea of having a large playspace and handed the keys to the player. If you want to go here, you can, and it might even save you some time if you use it as a shortcut. I'm tempted to classify this kind of a game as a "classic" open world, but more accurately, it's a sandbox. Think about it this way: sandboxes are not massive. As a small child, they're easy to get lost in. But the moment your legs start to sprout a few extra inches, you see the wooden planks holding up the small borders for what they are. As an older person, a beach might be where you want to go. But at the beach, there's always the fear of nature taking its course. If the water doesn't wash away your sandcastle, the crabs underneath the sand will scare you away. The sandbox is small, but you have more control as a compromise. Build a massive castle at the beach, and its scale might dwarf you, but built at your own level, you start to tell yourself stories. Video game sandboxes work in a similar manner; the bigger the map is, the more wasted its real estate is if the developers don't put it to good use. If the roads are smaller, though, there's less room to waste. You can link them, have them go to areas that the game never tells you to go to, and a curious player will think they've stumbled across something massive. Postal 2 is full of these areas; part of what makes this so much fun to go back to is discovering all of the possible shortcuts you can take. In reality, that answer is probably two or three, but in practice, it immerses you. The attitude of Postal might no longer be relevant, but the relatively small scale approach to non-linearity is timeless and makes revisiting this a blast every time.

What bums me out the most is that an excellent example to the contrary of that is actually this game's successor, Postal 4. A subtle running joke that's woven into this game is the use of cars as explosive barrels. The map of Paradise, Arizona, is small enough to be fully explorable by foot traffic without ever needing to resort to any other means. The idea that something that can take you to where you want to go within seconds is the best way of exploring the detailed map Running With Scissors has created is laughable. When you go to approach one of the many cars out of curiosity and resort to violence because you can't enter them, it's almost like the game is laughing at you for expecting less of the developers. While not hilarious in the traditional sense, it's perfect for Postal 2's "in your face" punk rock meets heavy metal aesthetic and cements what the developers set out to do with the technical limitations they had to put up with. In Postal 4, a game with a map that's probably more than twice as big as what's offered in Postal 2, the same gag appears a second time. The only difference is that it's there just be to be a callback to Postal 2. In Postal 4, any attempt at meta-humor is ruined because you spend a good chunk of your time exploring on a mobility scooter. This small, minor annoyance of mine is just the tip of the iceberg. In an attempt to look back at their glory days, Running With Scissors fundamentally misunderstood what parts of their game held up the best and cobbled together something else instead. It can technically be called Postal because it has the same whacko energy to it--but I wouldn't consider it a successor when the act of moving forward with an idea means you stumble in place every time.

In conclusion, I wish more of the Open World games that are coming out nowadays would harken back to the roots they were founded on. This isn't to say that I don't like Horizon, or Assassin's Creed, or Far Cry, or Ghost of Tsushima, or Day's Gone. But none of them feel original or exciting anymore. From what I've seen of Death Stranding, it seems to have tried something new, and I respect that--and hey, it even lets you throw your pee on people! Can't wait for the RWS collab coming... soon.

EDIT 4/16/24: Knocked off half a star because these developers are now delusional enough to think that their game, which is the most early-2000s shit imaginable, has aged well. No, it has not, shut the fuck up lmao

An absolute masterpiece. it's possibly the best game of all time, and certainly the most important one for me. The usage of lights and shadows, of organic and technical forms, horrifying sounds, animations that can be elated or deeply indifferent, places of transit, a grand sense of scale, the most considered use of color, the different pacing of sections, the artificial mystery - all of it has never been matched by anything else, and not because everything else is bad, but NaissanceE is just so good.

One point is especially important though - while I put it on a similar level as Transistor, it has a special connection to games: It could never be anything else. Other games could be adapted to have less gameplay or even be just a movie or a book. NaissanceE has no other option but to be a game, it could not work by just describing or passively viewing an exploration of the world, as it can be seen in the often-referenced BLAME! series. And even then, it doesn't have any overt gameplay.

If you're interested in video games as an art form, playing this is mandatory. And it's incredibly exciting to see the author working on a new game...

Yo shout out to Pepsi Man

I like pepsi, I go out of my way to enjoy a pepsi sometimes. Dare I say it’s one of my favorite sodas. I also quite enjoy the ps 1. This game attempts to take two great things and have them combine into PEPSI MAN.

This game goes way harder than any product placement game should be. Extremely quirky and funny game that is still surprising fun to play. It’s a linear runner and it’s got fun level design even with some annoying parts. From what I can tell this might be the first auto runner game of its kind.

Overall this is a fun charming hidden gem and it has some of the GREATEST cutscenes of all time.

Light 3.5/5

A brutal disgusting game showing the worst humanity has to offer...awesome?

This game just gets under my skin. The core concept alone is enough to turn me off with the game taking place inside a snuff film. That is terrifying especially when you consider those types of movies exist and they do get distributed on the dark web and such. They sound fucking horrible they are literally movies with real death and other horrible things for the enjoyment of disgusting people I have no desire to look into them (you shouldn’t either it’s not worth it)

But luckily this all works in manhunts favor. Everything great about this game from the story, atmosphere and gameplay all ties back from its concept. This is a intense stealth game literally requiring you to think like a killer stalking and sneaking up on your enemies. It’s both difficult and disturbing learning enemy patterns and trying to sneak up on enemies alone to kill them. This game doesn’t pull any punches if your not ready or if you don’t carefully plan out your killings you will die quickly. That’s because the core melee combat and shooting is incredibly clunky feeling even worse than gta 3. It’s a downside when you need to rely on it but for the most part the game encourages you to be stealthy.

This game really wants you to think like a slasher movie villain, hiding in the shadows and slowly studying the environments along with understanding the enemy locations. It’s a rewarding experience but never stops being disturbing because there really is no escape from the killings you have to take part in.


The atmosphere is bleak and unnerving. I really like the vhs aesthetic this game has with the menus and filters on the executions along with the cutscenes. It ties in with the underground snuff film story but also gives this game a vhs 80s horror film feel. The soundtrack is this dark ambient soundtrack with some industrial noise along with a lot of use of 80s synths and sometimes some guitars I think. Sounding like it takes a lot of inspiration from John Carpenter scores and various other slasher scores. It’s one of the greatest horror game soundtracks of all time.

The story is really interesting. The characters and gangs are all creepy in there own right and I feel like this game really tries to break down the type of people who like these types of movies. Essentially each gang is either a differnent type of degenerate or some type of person with mental issues. It’s this games way of exposing the awful things that happen in those movies not just with the violence but with the people who take part of them. Manhunt seems to want to expose the very thing the game is based on and it doesn’t hold back. Resulting in a unique horror experience.

strong 4/5

Are you kidding me?! Are you outta your MIIIND.

I legit secretly love this game. It’s a messy game based off a bad movie with a ton of unfocused gameplay styles. Changing genres or gimmicks practically every level. Yet that’s sorta what I like about it. It’s a so bad it’s good type of game yet there’s sometime endearing about this games endless attempts to switch it up.

You’ll be swimming around in 2d levels, then there’s a dance game, then there’s a racing level, there’s stealth sections and there’s punch out type bosses. Also more I probably forgot about. It’s too much to really keep track of yet that unpredictability is kinda what makes it work. I doubt people thought the shark tale game on gamecube was gonna be any good so playing this game is like dealing with all the random stuff the game throws at you and just laughing at it along the way. The film itself is already a massive meme so the game is just another way to make fun of shark tale. The game itself is kinda fun in a weird way even if it’s just a guilty pleasure.

It’s a short hilarious game that gives more life to this meme of a movie.

If you don’t like it that’s ok a lot of white fish don’t get it.

light 3/5
In reality it’s more of a strong 2/5 but I don’t care lol I want this game to be the new cool liscense game cult classic.

Why is the soundtrack fire they got a song freaking pitbull sampled. So epic

I’ll admit I never become a fan of the zelda series. I enjoy the games for what they are but I don’t really feel passoniate for any of them. The big exception was wind waker.

I just adore this games art direction and more carefree tone. It’s something that always stood out to me and the visuals are just fantastic even on gamecube original. The sailing and exploring is also really enjoyable as well. I know some people are mixed on this games map I always loved the setting along with all the islands and found sailing relaxing.

I guess the dungeons are more linear but I don’t care much in fact I kinda prefer it here. I like the items and found this game to have the most fluid combat in the series of the games I played.
The bosses here are really good I find them varied and enjoyable.

The characters are great having my favorite versions of zelda, link and ganondorf. Along with many of the side characters here. So much personality and charm.

Like many other games of the 6th generation this game has a strong water/tropical theme sorta similar to super mario sunshine (just more pirate than vacation) As someone who loves the setting this game appealed to me even more.

Certainly a nostalgic game for me as well this was one of the first games I got for my wii u and was my favorite game on the system for years. Might still be actually? Even tho it’s technically a gamecube game? LoL
Solid 4.5/5

Stupid mario game made by even stupider kids.

For a good few years this game was consistently in cycle of things I would play. Great way to exercise my creative side. Making my own levels and getting to design my own mario game was a blast. I had some great ideas even if they weren’t always executed the best. I tried building my levels around a gimmick or certain mechanic. I also liked making hard levels typically inspired by super meat boy or castlevania.


What elevated this game even further was the community aspect of awaiting the free updates and checking in to see all the awesome new levels made by the community felt special at the time. It helps the wii u had free online. Sure you had to go through a bunch of bad or mid levels but when you have the game open to a bunch of kids you can’t expect every level to be a hit.


I think this was the first game I managed to get day one too. If I get bored i’ll go more into detail of the levels I made.

solid 4/5