Supergiant's best effort yet, “Pyre” is my kind of sports game, where the real drama is off the court. The Liberation Rite is by far the greatest feature – you can earn freedom for one of your best teammates, but doing so removes them from the roster. Will you hold someone back because you want them for future matches? Unfortunately, there's an awkwardness to the actual sporting events – showboating with one character is more intuitive than coordinating the team, undermining the mantra of “three act as one.”

I don't think it's possible to make a "true" sequel to Postal 2 nowadays.

I'm not talking about the offensive humor or the minutiae of its small-scale sandbox and the chaos it lets you indulge in. What makes Postal 2 an exceedingly tricky game to follow up on is the era in which it was produced. Postal was created in the era of outrage. The finest example of this would be Grand Theft Auto and the numerous outrages it spawned at the time. But GTA never let you put a cat's ass on the barrel of your shotgun or go around peeing on people until they vomited. For all of its attempts at humor, Postal 2 was made in poor taste purely to get attention, and it worked wonders. Its content has slightly more historical merit in this medium than, 'hey, wasn't that the game that got banned in several countries?'—at least, if you're in America. It's thanks to Postal 2 that the M rating comes with two separate labels for violence outside of the Cartoon and Fantasy parameters, 'Violence' and 'Intense Violence.'

The problem now is that things don't "work" that way anymore. If there's any game in the past fifteen years that changed how Americans look at the way their games are rated, it's arguably Manhunt 2, and that's only because of how many politicians petitioned for it to get an Adults Only rating. Outside of that, which is small-beans compared to the irreversible change to the American rating system caused by Postal 2, there hasn't been much on offer. In the past ten years, you'd be hard-pressed to find another game like that. The closest analog is Hatred, which caught fire for treating Mass Shootings with more leeway than Uwe Boll. In a sense, Hatred almost surpasses Postal 4 in terms of relevance, if only because it mirrors the hellscape many Americans have constantly lived in fear of for over two decades at this point. Making a game about a mass shooting on that scale and not marketing it to outright weirdos who get off to the sight of Japanese school uniforms is like a cheat code for making your game controversial. Twenty years ago, it was easy to assume that any game that let you kill droves of nameless, faceless NPCs was a straight ticket to hell, much, in the same way, D&D was for the greater part of the 80s' Satanic Panic kicked off by the detestable con-woman Beatrice Sparks. All you have to do now is go through a Post Malone phase and put on this façade of having to say something "important", even if the only words you're saying constitute little more than shock value printed on the half-price pulp that the National Economic Registry hastily rejects in secret, and people will try their damnedest to take you seriously. Jack Thompson is dead.

This is the precise predicament that Postal 4 finds itself in: after its developer sold its soul to the Russian equivalent of Electronic Arts, an act only decried by ardent fans and the developers' post-mortem, the goalpost had moved. When your live-action adaptation only makes headlines because very few people find it funny, and the quotes you're cherry-picking from for marketing revert back to calling it a weaker version of South Park... what's the point? By the time Postal 4 was released in early access, it had been several years since a room full of critics applauded the Kevin Smith movie where Dante Hicks and Randal Graves argue about whether or not going ass-to-mouth is justified for minutes on end. Good Boys, a 2019 movie about children, had a trailer so perverse and explicit that I could see my dad physically recoiling in his seat whenever a trailer for it showed up in the theater we were at. To say that the shtick that worked in 2003 is something that would only spark protest from The Vegan Teacher in 2022 is being exceptionally polite.

On top of all of this... Postal 4's just not very fun. Okay, I'll admit that Postal 2 isn't exactly a high watermark for the medium as a whole. But to say that that's all it is is a reduction. It's dumb fun dry-aged in gold leaf. Once you crack through its shell, the center you're left is with is something that doesn't have much appeal outside of being a digital stress ball with piss-and-shit jokes and a cameo from Gary Coleman, but cutting right to the center is missing the point. It's fun to look around and find new weapons, find your way across the labyrinthine map to buy a Christmas tree in the middle of July, and play around with the surprisingly reactive world in front of you. Sure, it doesn't have the taste of something like Grand Theft Auto, and shivering behind all of the things that I like about it is just about the trashiest game I've ever played, but it's got replay value. What value does riding a mobility scooter across a map that's too large to entertain for more than a second have? "Grand Theft Auto had cars, and now so do we" is the exact mindset that Running With Scissors mocked in Postal 2, and it's something that's shamelessly regurgitated here without any of the wit or subversiveness seen previously; it's in here because Postal 2 had it, and if it's something they can reuse, self-awareness is off the fucking table. The combat's fun, but the AI somehow lags behind a game twenty years its senior. If you really, really want more Postal 2 to the point where you barely have any standards, look no further, but this is the exact kind of reduction that I warned against with nothing to dress it up.

It's not much of an Emperor's New Clothing for Running With Scissors to be met with derision, it's what they based their brand on. Hell, they're marketing this game right now with the 1/10 that GameSpot gave it. Here's where I suggest something completely different: Postal 4 is not only a weaker game than its predecessor; it's also a lazier one. Right down to flaunting the critical reception like a badge of honor! The more things change, the more they stay the same, but in this case, boy howdy have things not changed at all.

Want to make a proper sequel to Postal 2? Forget the apocalypse, forget a contemporary setting, forget mobility scooters and jokes about Karens and that one Tiger King guy and also COVID. None of that is relevant, and you might as well be making a game in another series if you believe it is. Postal built its brand of regression, and the funny thing is, it worked. Not one-hundred-percent, but I guarantee you that the first two games in this series are far more timeless than this will ever be. As I said, it was the era of outrage. 3D had only been a thing for one-and-a-half generations prior, and with video games only being readily available to the consumer for two to three decades, it's easy to argue that aspects of the medium were still in their infancy. Postal wasn't infamous for how good its gameplay was or how particularly shocking it was, it was part of a wave of digital entertainment that set a precedent. Decades apart, speaking about how regressive the series was is speaking about history.

If they wanted to make a true Postal 4, they had to embrace that. Set it back in the early 2000s, or, hell, late 90s. Make it a commentary on the crazed American politics that fueled both games with the stunning insight that such a large gap in time has caused, while also paying mind to the new wave of gaming it was a part of. You don't need a massive map or aspects that feel appropriated from other, much better contemporary titles. Fuck struggling to catch up, this should have been behind.

I know it comes off as pompous and arrogant to readily assume that you could do better than someone else when creativity is involved. Especially in game development, dick-swinging is what typically leads to developers slaving away for years and, in some cases, over a decade on something that might not work out in the end. But consider how fascinating it would have been if Postal 4 actually embraced its roots instead of chasing the bitter aftertaste that III left in everyone's mouth. I'm sure the developers would know; their CEO was unironically tweeting before the 2020 election about how Joe Biden should be thrown in Guantanamo Bay for crimes that haven't been proven.

At least I bought these games before discovering the developer's Twitter...

To put it simply, one of the most unique and soulful experiences in the whole medium. It's lengthy, deep, intriguing and has a very strong devotion to immersion. This game really isn't about it's mechanics, it's about the insanely believable and memorable world it creates and how you can uncover it's many secrets by being curious and attentive. At times it's humorous, other times its creepy or just plain weird and everything in between. A fantastic walking sim.

Unfortunately, it is a game for a niche audience since it really does require a lot of patience and an eye for detail or being interested to some extent in city infrastructure. It's a game especially made for those that want to get lost in a unique world that's under the mask of a normal contemporary setting and don't mind spending time simply observing and figuring stuff out, probably the best urban exploration game out there too.

If you have the patience and the curiosity, don't skip this one!