Postal: Brain Damaged succeeds by using the series’ scattershot satire as a basis to build great levels.
Like most sensible people, I long ago wrote off the Postal series as an idea that started terribly, enjoyed some fleeting glory in the same wave of cultural disaffection that brought us Limp Bizkit and the Attitude Era, and has spent the decades since thrashing around in search of relevance. Yet several times over the last few years, I’ve heard furtive whispers from various corners of the internet that there is one Postal game which is actually, genuinely good.
No, I’m not referring to Postal 2, which despite inexplicably having the same Steam rating as Half-Life 2, is a pretty shoddy game. Its open world may have been ahead of the curve back in 2003, but even when I first played it as a socially awkward 15-year-old (the primary audience for Postal games) I could see through the fountains of blood and voluminous arcs of urine that it wasn’t a good shooter.
Rather, I’m referring to Postal: Brain Damaged, a spinoff FPS released in 2022 that, crucially, is not developed by series creators Running with Scissors. Instead, it’s made by Hyperstrange—a team of Polish indie designers that specialise in shooters. Hyperstrange’s other projects include the sword-and-sorcery hack ‘n’ slash Elderborn and the grimdark cowboy blaster Blood West, both enjoyable retro shooters that are infused with modern ideas. But is it really possible to take the crusty tube-sock that is Postal and make something worthwhile out of it?
A couple of things immediately separate Brain Damaged from Running With Scissors’ games. The first is that it actually has an art style—and a pretty good one too. Brain Damaged’s world is drawn in vivid colours, kooky expressionist angles, and pixels the size of postage stamps, a world away from the flat, uninspired visuals of the mainline series.
The second is that the whole game takes place inside the Postal Dude’s depraved, deranged mind, which Hyperstrange uses as permission to build levels that are surrealist dreamscapes. Admittedly, Postal has never needed much persuading to detach itself from reality, but here there is a concerted effort to build geometrically interesting spaces, rather than whatever allows the designers to make a crude joke.
The first level, for example, takes place in a vision of suburbia that is at once insufferably saccharine and deeply cursed, with picturesque, pastel-coloured houses lining streets that gnarl and twist into shapes that resemble razor wire—clearly inspired by Psychonauts’ much-loved Milkman Conspiracy level These houses are populated by Postal’s obligatory NPCs that you can slaughter if you choose, such as realtors wearing crimson jackets.
