True art in the guise of exploitation
POSTAL is a horror game where you are the horror.
It serves as a deconstruction of the moral debate on violence in video games. This is the game many anti-video game protesters like Jack Thompson, Joe Lieberman, and Hillary Clinton keep stereotyping all video games as, if it didn't have a terrifying story and a deconstructionist theme around the gameplay.
This is a game where you massacre as many people, including innocent civilians, then move on to the next level to do the same. However, the pained screams of your victims, the ruined locations, the corpses piling up, the unnerving atmospheric sounds, and the terrifying loading screen music, all serve to make you feel wrong about going on genocide crusades. You play as the Postal Dude, who has a much darker personality in this game than later, more comedic entries in the POSTAL franchise. You follow the Postal Dude as he is having delusions of a plague making people violent with him having illusions of putting them out of their misery. But just listening to their screams makes you realise that you are wrong, but not the character you are playing as.
The gameplay itself is a simple twin-stick shooter, but the tank controls in the original release were terrible. However, playing with a console controller or KB+M with the modern control scheme is much better.
The game has a "2D background, 3D foreground" style to it similar to the PS1 Final Fantasy and Resident Evil games and it looks good here. The low-poly character models are unimpressive even for the time but the hand-painted backgrounds look appropriately gritty and are great works of art.
The music and sound design are phenomenal and serve to make the game feel even more unnerving. The lack of music in actual gameplay just enhances the tone.
This is an easy recommendation but I would recommend getting POSTAL Redux, a full remake with improved gameplay and visuals, as well as a lot of added features. This is still good for curiousity's sake, though.
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