POSTAL (1997)/Redux
10/21/1997: I am the celestial gardener, policing the planet of the stink weeds and poisons which leak out even through the cracks in the cold asphalt sidewalks of the City of Sin!
- The reason for going on a killing spree in the first place. According to the manual, the town of Paradise has come under the effect of a madness inducing plague and the Postal Dude is the only person able to put a stop to it. Of course, given his diary entries and sadistic enjoyment of causing death and destruction, he's probably just flown over the cuckoo's nest.
- The diary entries in between levels, e.g. "10/17/97 The Earth is hungry. It's heart throbs and demands cleansing. The Earth is also thirsty..."note
- The screams of the dying will definitely qualify.
- The unsettling menu screens, very unsettling loading screens, and the total horror of the credits screen (pictured above), in which also features a deceased BABY in it! (Albeit this was edited out in Redux) The amount of Body Horror depicted in all of these is disturbing as all hell.
- And in case you thought it wasn't disturbing enough, Redux has redrawn the menu and loading screens for extra detail, and given them animation.
- Also, due to Early Installment Weirdness, the violence isn't Played for Laughs nearly as much as Postal 2 and the subsequent sequels: the only thing remotely funny is Rick Hunter's signature Badass Baritone quipping Bond One Liners - and even then, it's implied that he isn't the voice for The Postal Dude himself, but a Literal Split Personality and/or Demonic Possessor forcing The Postal Dude on a killing spree For the Evulz.
- The ending for the original game
counts as this, big time. The final level starts off at an elementary school, where you're seemingly given no choice but to gun down the laughing and playing children - except they don't die, or even react, to being shot at, running through fire, or dodging rocket launcher rounds. Then the Postal Dude, seemingly having what little remains of his sanity snap like a twig, passes out, while the camera blurs out to blackness. Then he wakes up locked in a Bedlam House, while a distorted voice talks about how the stress of modern day life causes people like the character to "Go Postal", all while saying your atrocities would never be understood by anybody else, even if you deluded yourself into being a One Man Army fighting against all odds. The voice then says that, while they will never understand what set you off, "rest assured, we WILL have plenty of time to study [you]."- The ending for the Redux edition isn't much better. Simply put, The Dude comes across a funeral procession, and this simple event causes him to have his breakdown due to one of two potential reasons: One, he likely thought the funeral was for him, and that he was Dead All Along. Two, if there are people capable of mourning the dead in the middle of a hate plague he was allegedly the only one left uninfected in, that means that there probably was none to begin with or he did TOO good a job at stopping it, and he likely killed hundreds and hundreds of innocent people for no reason other than his own paranoia.
- Also, take note that the only hostile on the map is no one but the Postal Dude himself.
- The Hard Mode ending only opens up more theories, considering that we now see a man and a woman standing over the casket as it is lowered down into the grave. Could it be the Postal Dude's parents watching his own son's funeral procession and that the whole game was nothing but a Dying Dream? Some people have noted that the two persons standing over the grave along with the priest look a lot like the Postal Dude and his wife from Paradise Lost. This could very well mean that we've been playing as T. Dude, Sr. the whole game and that he just watched his own son watch his funeral.
- The soundtrack qualifies as insanity in music form. Here's an example.
- Redux's soundtrack manages to be even more horrifying.
- If you're brave enough to face your fears, wait until you see The City loading screen (pictured above), which features a flaming skeleton-like figure which will likely keep you awake the whole night! God have mercy! While in Redux, the song uses an ear-ringing noise instead of a looped human scream.
- To make things even worse, the "Texbeast" loading screen from the said level appears as a cop carrying a Rocket Launcher and a handgun in Postal 1's Trading Cards, bearing a Psychotic Smirk, putting the actual loading screen to shame. This is what it really looks like outside the Postal Dude's point of view.
- Redux's soundtrack manages to be even more horrifying
- Some of the Dude's lines are pretty creepy, but with a touch of Black Comedy. He really changed a lot from Postal 1 to Postal 2. However, in Redux, the Postal Dude sounds like an actual mass murderer instead of a comedic lunatic.
- Some of the game's areas have eerie ambient sound effects playing once you're near them that really pump up a little more of that psychotic feel of the game. The same sound effects can be heard in Postal 2, playing in certain areas for no reason at all other than weird out the player.
POSTAL 2
- In one house, you find that the bathroom floor, sink, and bathtub are covered in blood.
- The sewers in the game are pretty eerie. They are mostly dark with only a red tint to accompany them, and there is an ambient drone that is heard whenever you go there. There are also mutated burned up hellhounds roaming them, ready to attack the Dude on sight.
- In a huge case of Surprise Creepy, there's the "Get Steaks" mission on Thursday. Walking in to the butcher shop, the fact nobody is at the counter should be a clue that something bad is about to go down soon. Walking into the back you find The Butchers, a gaggle of bloody butcher-apron-wearing lunatics who are Ax-Crazy by even Postal's Crapsack World standards. And what cements their wicked reputation so firmly? Literally the second you walk in, you see a trio of Butchers laughing madly as they watch people being dropped into the whirring blades of a meat grinder - ALIVE, might as we add - and the reason they turn on you is because they don't want you ruining their "fun". Thankfully, a well-armed Postal Dude should be able (and more than willing) to blast all of these loonies to hamburger meat themselves.
- From the same level, you come across a whole cow stuck face-first in a huge meat grinder, with its lower back and legs sticking upward as it gets mulched gruesomely. It's probably one of the goriest and most unsettling moments in the whole game, though it is a bit funny just by how ridiculous it is.
- The level where you get kidnapped by rednecks and help up in a sex dungeon at the brewery. Based on the many sexual torture devises in the room the Postal Dude wakes up and fight his way through, who knows what horribly depraved things they were planning to do to him, or already did to him.
- The hallucinations the Dude experiences throughout the expansion pack Apocalypse Weekend certainly count. Whenever one happens, the world around him becomes disturbing and distorted, with walls turning into moving flesh and blood stained tiling straight out of Silent Hill. In one specific hallucination in the game taking place in the offices, all the doors are plastered with a creepy baby (Gary Coleman?) face on them◊.
- The creepy fat nurse (pictured above) from the intro cutscene of Apocalypse Weekend. Luckily it was only a dream.
- Apocalypse Weekend also introduces undead zombies into the mix, as well as many creepy encounters with zombified Gary Colemans (probably rendered more creepy after his (apparent?) death).
- A fanmade game, Eternal Damnation, included in the Fudge Pack edition of Postal 2, is full of Nightmare Fuel, especially in parts of the game where giant Body Worlds-like corpses chase you down the street.
- The final boss of Apocalypse Weekend, Mike J: the Mad Cow of Zombies and God of Hellfire. In general, you are fighting the producer of Running With Scissors as a giant mutated humanoid zombie cow. note He is tough, large, leaves a trail of fire in his path and has flaming Gary Colman heads to shield him from the Postal Dude's attacks. He is a horrendous sight to behold."All bow down and worship my asscock!"
- Paradise Lost however turns him from horrendous to hilarious, by essentially making him a regular guy, trying to have a regular wedding, who just so happens to be the ten-foot-tall mutant leader of a legion of zombies, and who makes money by selling his own milk to the public.
- Paradise Lost gives us mutated dogs, which are larger than normal dogs from the original Postal 2. They only appear in the Cock Asian mission, but are still pretty creepy regardless.
- Speaking of the Cock Asian, plenty of hints to the meat used in the food is included in the kitchen and storage room. In fact, if you go back to the restaurant's storage room in Thursday, a cage full of zombies will be there. We're sure you can connect the dots.
- You go to Hell on the last day of Paradise Lost. The depiction is typical of most depictions of Hell: fiery lakes of lava, skeletons in chains on walls, zombies, the return of the above mutated dogs (now less mutated and more hellish, complete with glowing red eyes) and gimps and cows in cages. The screams of the damned heard throughout the level are also pretty unsettling.
- In the original Postal 2, there is a house you can find filled with cats and and a woman. If you go to that house in Paradise Lost, the house is still full of cats, but the bathtub in the other room has a headless corpse in it. A strange drone is also audible in the house.
- The zombie cows, especially when they charge at you.
- In the former police station where you meet Zack Ward, if you go to Anthony Hopkins' solitary door, instead of it being empty as usual, you're gonna see some bizarre cow-like doll inside sitting on a toilet while a creepy drone plays in the background.
- The monkeys on the first day in the CCCP building. Especially the fact that they have the top of their head cut and you can see their brain. Although it can kind of shift to funny when you free them and they spout odd lines in a synthetic voice while shooting their tormentors.
- The game's Asylum, complete with hostile inmates, doctors and a creepy track just for it. It gets worse for one of Paradise Lost's errands on Wednesday, where you have to go through all three buildings to find parts to fix an air conditioner - parts which the inmates and doctors are apparently worshipping, and will throw themselves at you in huge numbers to protect.
- The Postal 2 Cursed Tape. A fan machinima inspired by The Ring where all the gore and violence in Postal is shown in a very, very much more horrific context.
POSTAL III
Postal Dude: I REGRET NOTHIIIIIIIINNNNNG!
- While there isn't a whole lot of creepy content in the third installment, but the game itself is, also, the goriest in the series thanks to the use of Source engine. You can decapitate a random bystander with a handgun and, sometimes, they yell even with their heads blown off, which is pretty disturbing.
- Champ biting a man's leg in the beginning and the end of the Dog School mission, depending on your prespective.
- In the very end of the Insane Ending, the Postal Dude gets sent into hell along with his dog, Champ (pictured above). Thankfully, this is non-canon. However.
- The "Good" Ending features the Postal Dude as the President of The United States, which at the end, he's about to press the button to activate the Doomsday-Matrix 3000 with a devilish grin.
Postal Dude: *Evil Laughter*Postal Babe: What's so funny?Postal Dude: I will regret NOTHING.
2007 Film
- The head's on pikes in the Postal Dude's boss's office, as pictured. Even though the boss jokes that they are fake and just there to scare employees (even though one of them starts leaking blood), they are still pretty creepy.
- J. K. Simmons' creepy smiley face after getting bombed by a suicide bomber.
- All the kids at Uwe Boll's Nazi Theme Park getting gunned down. We get a pleasant aerial shot of the huge pile of dead kids laying about.
