There were more than a few times where I felt like the NPCs were just stray animals, except only about half of them responded to outside stimulus, as if they were deaf or blind.
The only real difference between a stray cat and an adult human in practice is how the character models look and animate. NPCs just wander around the town with no real purpose or agency. The experience looks and moves like a remaster of Postal 2, except it feels even less polished and cohesive. The whole game feels like it came directly from 2001, including the feeling of the controls, weapon handling, physics, audio, and most of the graphics. Just running around and exploring Edensin feels like you stepped out of a time machine, but not because of any artistic or design choices. The triggers for loading kick in in a similar fashion to Half-Life or S.T.A.L.K.E.R., though this world doesn’t feel anywhere near as large as those examples. You can run and use vehicles to get around the map, but moving beyond a couple of hundred feet or so will trigger loading sequences which ruin any feeling that the environment feels expansive.
These jobs are scattered amongst the town and the play area is presented and touted as an open world, but in practice, it doesn’t really feel this way. Different spots in town can offer quests or tasks for Postal Dude to tackle ranging from assistance with everyday municipal chores like animal control or installing bidets. You show your cardboard sign proposition to enough people and eventually, you’ll get sent along to a staffing office, setting in motion the basic framework of Postal 4. Don’t fret now, the humor only gets classier from here. Postal Dude writes on the cardboard that he is looking for work and will perform sex acts if needed. You get dropped into a canyon with some homeless addicts and find a sharpie and cardboard box. It is here where the action gets going as Postal Dude aims to restart his life. After the fictional town of Paradise is nuked to dust, our ‘protagonist’ Postal Dude wanders down the desert road until approaching the town of Edensin, Arizona. Players familiar with the earlier Postal titles should consider the new game as an official follow-up to Postal 2, with the events depicted in No Regerts acting as a bit of a retcon of the events from Postal 3. Following nearly three additional years in development, the studio is ready to declare Postal 4 a finished product. Postal 4: No Regerts was released into Steam Early Access way back in 2019. More than a decade after the franchise was seemingly buried with the release of the abysmal Postal 3 in 2011, Running With Scissors has chosen to take another stab at forging the ultimate douchebag amusement park. It was buggy, unstable, and didn’t really have much structure or direction beyond ‘do violent things to NPCs.’ It dropped the overhead view for a more conventional first-person shooter approach while dialing up the edgelord humor and filth.
POSTAL 4 ART SERIES
A few years down the road, the development team returned with a different take on the series in the form of Postal 2. It married an isometric viewpoint that was quite popular at the time with excessive violence and edgelord humor in a way that helped the game overcome its incredibly rough edges. Way back in 1997, Running With Scissors released the first Postal game onto PC.
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