POSTAL: Classic and Uncut, the game banned in more than ten countries

For some, the discomfort of shooting ordinary people is the whole point of the game; for others, it's just dated controls that get in the way of playing.

The game banned in more than ten countries

More than ten countries have banned POSTAL. The reason isn't the genre or the isometric aim — it's the target. You're not shooting aliens or fantasy monsters; you're shooting ordinary residents, protesters, an entire marching band parading down the street, with nothing dressed up to soften the trigger pull. The store sums up the premise as a psychological action-strategy thriller: no quest to rescue a princess, just a man on the edge of sanity deciding how far he'll go.

The version arriving in the catalog now is Classic and Uncut, which bundles the original game and the Special Delivery add-on into a single install — extra levels and a larger cast of people to run into along the way. Anyone who wants to share the carnage jumps into the multiplayer mode named Go Postal. The name behind the whole thing from start to finish is one and the same house: Running With Scissors also distributes its own game, with no publisher behind it — the brand that carried the controversy is the same one that still decides, to this day, where and how it shows up.

This edition showed up in the catalog on April 17, 2009, filed by the store itself under the labels shooter, action, and horror — three words that together give no warning about the unease the game deliberately sets out to provoke.

The story that only shows up in the manual

Two reviews, written years apart, reach the same point by different roads. On April 19, 2009, one player explains that the plot lives off-screen: it's in the manual, told as a portrait, chapter by chapter, of a man convinced the whole world wants him dead. On November 16, 2021, another describes the same device from inside the game itself — a diary read on the loading screens between levels, dated as if it were 1997, with no soundtrack, only the screams of those who fall. You're the one leafing through that diary between levels, and the one who decides whether to believe his excuse.

Months later, on May 19, 2022, a third reading goes further: it calls the game a deliberate deconstruction of the debate over violence in games, citing Jack Thompson, Joe Lieberman, and Hillary Clinton as voices who held up POSTAL as proof of the worst games could do — and it hands the argument back, saying the discomfort of killing ordinary people is the point, not the carelessness of the people who made it. None of these readings deny the obvious: the review from April 23, 2009 already called the controls an admitted weak spot, a leftover from an era without dual analog sticks, when turning and aiming took separate buttons — and even so it recommended the game, warning that anyone who grasps what it's trying to be won't be thrown by the friction.

On July 4, 2021, a more practical review gives the measure: you can finish the original game and the extra pack in about four hours. The same person warns that the game doesn't save on its own — you have to save at the start of each mission — and that the enemies soak up too many bullets for the size of the level, yet still calls the experience enjoyable.

When turning left turns the game against you

On October 18, 2012, a player who loved the demo as a kid tried to find that same feeling again in the full version — and didn't. The reason he points to is technical, not emotional: in newer isometric games, like Bastion, left and right always point to the same side of the screen; here they swap direction depending on whether the character has his back to the camera or is facing it. You're the one who freezes in the middle of a firefight trying to remember which way the character is looking, while the shots keep coming.

Three days later, on October 21, 2012, another review describes the problem as a genuine flaw, not lost nostalgia: on Windows 7, the turn-left key doesn't respond properly, even after the fix offered by the store itself, and fallen enemies keep spinning on the ground, breaking the scene. On December 26, 2010, another player had already given that same key a name: unplayable. A complaint from November 2017 piles onto the earlier ones but shifts the target: it claims Running With Scissors itself treats this version as forgotten and recommends, elsewhere, the edition sold on Steam.

A review from November 11, 2017 doesn't even try to patch up the argument: it says anyone who wants to laugh at over-the-top violence finds that in POSTAL 2, or in GTA and Saints Row.

Who can stand the discomfort, and who should just move on to another game

POSTAL doesn't ask you to relax: it puts an entire marching band parading down the street and a crowd of protesters within reach of your weapon, and expects that to sit heavy somewhere in your gut. The reason it was banned in more than ten countries is the same one that draws in whoever takes that deal: treating the friction of the controls as part of the discomfort, not as a defect to be forgiven. That person finds, in the manual and on the loading screens, a story few games in the genre bothered to tell.

Anyone after something else — the players themselves have already pointed to the exit: to laugh at that kind of over-the-top violence, they point to POSTAL 2, or GTA and Saints Row; for controls that respond without a mental recalculation at every turn, any newer isometric game does the job. The overall approval here is a majority, but it's far from unanimous — and after reading the two piles of reviews, the split makes sense: it isn't people who hate the game against people who love it, it's the same discomfort read as the point by some and as a technical failure by others.