Running on four hours of sleep in 48 hours, bear with me being a little goofy.
So I won't get into the subject matter of the Postal games. It's reactionary tripe that strawmans literally everything and the emergent gameplay can occasionally be entertaining in the "That certainly just happened" sense, but it's incredibly sophomoric in every way.
Also buggy, unstable programs that crash constantly.
They're supposed to be some grand statement about how video games aren't art and are ultimately meaningless time wasters, while at the same time the director thinks they're amazing games that would be household names and regarded among the greatest games of all time if not THE greatest... if not for a vast feminist conspiracy, according to his Tumblr. Which I won't be linking here because the Running with Scissors tumblr has some vile takes on it.
I'm not debating video games as art. It is my opinion that they are, regardless of quality. As such, even Postal, Postal 2, Postal 3, and Postal 4 are art. Terrible art, but art nonetheless.
But here's the kicker. There's a genuine artistic statement here: That art is meaningless and video games are more meaningless than art.
Postal 2 is the one I've played, and then because it was a gift and I was morbidly curious. It's an incredibly self indulgent tour into the minds of the developers through shock humor, as a surface level read, where the devs themselves are portrayed as the ultimate rich cool dudes and the player is merely trying to make it into their good graces as little more than a patsy they fired at the beginning of the week.
All as some kind of statement that video games can never be art, if you listen to the developers talk about it. This is an artistic statement in and of itself. The glorious paradox of making art about how your art isn't art.
Noah Caldwell Gervais has some pretty interesting takes on the Postal games that I'll be linking at the end of this, he talks about a lot of the things I've talked about here. Probably better than I do tbh.
These types of developers are a genuinely interesting rabbit hole to go down if your mental health can stand seeing the vile shit they spew. RWS is one of the only ones I've seen make it semi mainstream with even a minor subculture like the Boomer Shooter community, though.
PS: This is the shit I get up to when my internet's too scrungled to stream for long periods.
