I've flip-flopped back and forth between saying "I genuinely like this game" and "Postal 2 is only good as a guilty pleasure" for a few years. In truth, this is a game that's hard to classify. Is it trying so hard to be offensive that it ends up being a bland exercise in poor taste, or does that bad taste coalesce into something more compelling? Having played through Postal 2 multiple times, I can sense a whiff of some social commentary, but anything profound you take out of it is an unintended side-effect of the climate in which it was produced. Strangely, that makes it so this winds up being one of the most fascinating PC games from the last twenty years. Postal 2 has aged so poorly that it's wrapped around to being a genuinely interesting piece of history--which is weird to say about a game where there's a dedicated button to unzip your trousers so you can pee on pedestrians. But really, no other period in time could produce something like this. If Postal 2 was made nowadays, people would say it feels like a cute throwback to 2003.

The question is: now that the shock factor has worn off, is it worth playing nowadays? I think so. Postal 2 harkens back to the origins of the Open World format. The whole "build a massive world and copy-paste everything" formula wasn't there yet, mainly because the technology to back it up wasn't, either. Instead, older games took the idea of having a large playspace and handed the keys to the player. If you want to go here, you can, and it might even save you some time if you use it as a shortcut. I'm tempted to classify this kind of a game as a "classic" open world, but more accurately, it's a sandbox. Think about it this way: sandboxes are not massive. As a small child, they're easy to get lost in. But the moment your legs start to sprout a few extra inches, you see the wooden planks holding up the small borders for what they are. As an older person, a beach might be where you want to go. But at the beach, there's always the fear of nature taking its course. If the water doesn't wash away your sandcastle, the crabs underneath the sand will scare you away. The sandbox is small, but you have more control as a compromise. Build a massive castle at the beach, and its scale might dwarf you, but built at your own level, you start to tell yourself stories. Video game sandboxes work in a similar manner; the bigger the map is, the more wasted its real estate is if the developers don't put it to good use. If the roads are smaller, though, there's less room to waste. You can link them, have them go to areas that the game never tells you to go to, and a curious player will think they've stumbled across something massive. Postal 2 is full of these areas; part of what makes this so much fun to go back to is discovering all of the possible shortcuts you can take. In reality, that answer is probably two or three, but in practice, it immerses you. The attitude of Postal might no longer be relevant, but the relatively small scale approach to non-linearity is timeless and makes revisiting this a blast every time.

What bums me out the most is that an excellent example to the contrary of that is actually this game's successor, Postal 4. A subtle running joke that's woven into this game is the use of cars as explosive barrels. The map of Paradise, Arizona, is small enough to be fully explorable by foot traffic without ever needing to resort to any other means. The idea that something that can take you to where you want to go within seconds is the best way of exploring the detailed map Running With Scissors has created is laughable. When you go to approach one of the many cars out of curiosity and resort to violence because you can't enter them, it's almost like the game is laughing at you for expecting less of the developers. While not hilarious in the traditional sense, it's perfect for Postal 2's "in your face" punk rock meets heavy metal aesthetic and cements what the developers set out to do with the technical limitations they had to put up with. In Postal 4, a game with a map that's probably more than twice as big as what's offered in Postal 2, the same gag appears a second time. The only difference is that it's there just be to be a callback to Postal 2. In Postal 4, any attempt at meta-humor is ruined because you spend a good chunk of your time exploring on a mobility scooter. This small, minor annoyance of mine is just the tip of the iceberg. In an attempt to look back at their glory days, Running With Scissors fundamentally misunderstood what parts of their game held up the best and cobbled together something else instead. It can technically be called Postal because it has the same whacko energy to it--but I wouldn't consider it a successor when the act of moving forward with an idea means you stumble in place every time.

In conclusion, I wish more of the Open World games that are coming out nowadays would harken back to the roots they were founded on. This isn't to say that I don't like Horizon, or Assassin's Creed, or Far Cry, or Ghost of Tsushima, or Day's Gone. But none of them feel original or exciting anymore. From what I've seen of Death Stranding, it seems to have tried something new, and I respect that--and hey, it even lets you throw your pee on people! Can't wait for the RWS collab coming... soon.

EDIT 4/16/24: Knocked off half a star because these developers are now delusional enough to think that their game, which is the most early-2000s shit imaginable, has aged well. No, it has not, shut the fuck up lmao