Postal Redux: a Justified Reputation?

I Played Postal Redux and What Happens Next Will Blow Your Mind

Before I get into the gruesome details of Running With Scissors first game, I need to provide some context to the postal legacy, at least enough context to pad my wordcount. As you'll see, there's not much to say regarding Postal's gameplay, but when it comes to the games controversy there's enough to write an entire book, that or a 12,000 word article on Kotaku. This isn't to say that I'll be pimping a link to my first-ever self published ebook, Postal 1 is actually a bit before my time. The 90's saw a crackdown on all manners of fun things by the American congress, next on the chopping block was the gaming industry. An industry that was putting Americas youth behind the digital gun and brainwashing them to become a generation of mass-murderers. The just-in-time founding of the ESRB added some much needed order to the industry, but the issue still stood and games like Doom, Mortal Kombat and Postal were in the all-star police lineup of offenders. That's the key phrase; "games like Postal".

Running With Scissors is the developer that's first game was the most "like Postal" because their first game was Postal. On it's exterior, an extremely violent, nihilistic and mean-spirited game that mirrors the comment sections of our favorite websites. Postal was and maybe still is the perfect anti-game argument for boomer politicians and anti-violence activists. From Postals exterior, it's not the most objectionable notion that the game has an objectionable premise and likely heinous subject matter. To a non-gamer, its a done deal, Postal bad, Friday the 13th good. I'm pretty dismissive of the controversy and chalked it up to both mass hysteria and profitable fear-mongering, though I had yet to play the controversial title. I've already played Hatred and had interest in Postal 2, so I bought both Postal 2 and the Postal 1 re-release; Postal Redux. I had finally delved into the actual content matter to quell the curiosity that had nagged me for years, though there's an old adage about curiosity; something about Cats. I don't know, I've never seen the stage play. 

Postal: the Arsenal of a Madman

I played through all of Postal Redux's Excess Postage campaign on normal, I did give the hard difficulty a try but found to be actually hard. On the normal difficulty I found it too easy just blasting through every level with minimal deaths. There's no real Goldilocks zone of difficulty in Postal and I wasn't about to suffer through 23 missions on a difficulty that would call for a lot of retries. There's no checkpoints and a glut of gameplay about as varied as Tetris. Either a lack of balancing or difficulty led to the double-shotgun being adequate to kill every enemy in the game, but there's still an arsenal to make use of the number keys. The H&K looking submachinegun offers range and unlimited ammo, at the cost of potency, this spares us the need for a melee weapon, that would be too brutal maybe. Running With Scissors dodged a bullet by omitting any semi-auto rifles that are a contentious topic even to this day, though they also forgot to add actual sharpened scissors to the arsenal, I would have assumed it'd be a given at this point. The rest is pretty common videogame fare, a missile launcher, flame thrower, flame launcher, magnum pistol, and a bunch of throwables, grenades mostly, though the previously stated double-shotty never left me wanting more. 

Postal Dude Vs the People

Had Postal Dude aimed his ire at demonkind, robots, or even human criminals, there'd be a lot less controversy to speak of other than the red-sauce leaking out Dude's pixelated victims. Context matters when it comes to violence, the campaign progress doesn't require killing any unarmed bystanders but Rampage Mode does. Either mode will involve murdering hundreds of military and law enforcement and even some automated turrets, there's violence against technology, add one more to the list of atrocities. The injured and dying npcs of the game will crawl on the ground begging for either mercy or death and can be finished off with an execute move, as bad as it sounds, it's not much more than either dramatically shooting or bludgeoning the mortally wounded. It's surprisingly tame compared to other games I've played, if that's an unfair comparison, consider the fact that there would already be nine Friday the 13th entries before 1997. A film series that's strongest appeal is the slaughter of college kids by a deranged serial killer. I'd hate to come off as morbid, but Postal is a bit underwhelming in the violence department.

Mercilessly Beating the Game...to Death!

Moving from one level to another means killing 90% or more of the hostiles (police) in every single level except for the last. I'd knock it for being too repetitive, but that's not a real complaint considering some of the best games of all time are pretty simple. I think the real issue here is that Postal straddles the line between isometric action and real-time strategy, there are some elements of cover and concealment, but there's no stealth weapons in the game. If Postal is an action game, then it's stifled by the debris and items cluttering the levels that make circle-strafing often impossible. Strategy doesn't fit the "going postal" theme, but there's enough exploding barrels and gas pumps to add some spicy flavor, though learning to rely on haphazardly placed incendiaries isn't a late game necessity. The difficulty in Postal is pretty static even though the later levels feature an industrial complex and air force base. The Redux version adds the Japan levels and Carnival that are a bit out of place. Postal Dude isn't getting on a plane once, let alone for the return trip back to the US to conclude the game, though extra missions are an added value for fans. 

Edgy Enough to Cut Butter 

At a glance Postal is an offensive, anti-social punch to the face of civilized society, but the birds eye view of the carnage is about as deep as it gets. There are plenty of games where the innocent can be gunned down and the police serve as antagonists. Postal doesn't really set itself apart from it's contemporaries in terms of visceral gore and subject matter. There's blood, but not buckets of gore and gibs strewn across the landscape. No freeze frames or cinematics of extreme violence to warp the fragile minds of impressionable youths. I buy games like Postal and Hatred for the same reason I watch slasher movies, a kind of morbid curiosity draws me to the content, gross, I know. If I had to stack Postal up against other disturbing content, I'd be hard pressed to rank it highly against other games, so the only thing left in my opinion, is a forgettable isometric shooter that failed to tread any bloody footprints on new ground.

Marketing the Mayhem

Let's just acknowledge for a second that controversy sells. When it comes to unknown publishers, nothing builds intrigue like the scornful articles vomited onto the webpages and newspapers en masse. Perfect example is the Polish developer Destructive Creations first game, Hatred that's a spiritual successor to Postal 1 and I think that it did more to help the young studio using controversy more than content. You can't spell "infamy" without "fame" and Hatred really achieved infamy for a short time. Mirroring the marketing model of Running With Scissors maybe wise, if not exploitive. The fastest way to stardom is controversy, but if I were to argue in the defense of gamers, novelty dries up pretty quick, what lies underneath needs to be solid, satisfying gameplay. If you look at the two top selling games of all time, Minecraft and Tetris, there surely was some initial novel concepts at play, but the base level of these two games is a level of interaction that needs no fancy gimmicks or visuals. Running with Scissors got peoples attention in the 90's but they need to deliver with some more substance 2000s.

All that Aftermath

I played Postal Redux and it didn't turn me into a violent puddle of goo that refuses to pay taxes, much to the dismay of people 40 years my senior. There's a argument to be made that the premise and content Postal is pretty gross, but amongst a sea of other violent content, it doesn't stand out to me current year. I think that the story of controversy in film and digital mediums is here to stay, there's a lot of cash to be made on both sides, so the cycle will perpetuate. It's a supply-demand economy after all and as long as consumers understand how they're being manipulated then there's no real victims, only digital ones.

If Postal Redux is the proverbial edgy teen searching for a sense of identity, then Postal 2 may just be the unintentional dark comedic Verner Herzog documentary about the poorly adjusted adult that's just too entertaining to ignore. Entertaining is a big factor, bigger than I think game devs, filmmakers and novelists often realize. If my assumptions about Postal 2 are right, then it may just be the train-wreck of comedy and violence that justifies the cult following the sequel has. Though all of that is speculation until I play and review it. Until then, Comrades.