Postal 4: No Regerts (2022) - The "Worst Game of the Year" That I Still Love

POSTAL 4: No Regerts got dragged through the mud by every major outlet on the planet. IGN hit it with a 2/10. GameSpot gave it a 1/10. Metacritic ranked it dead last out of 824 games rated in 2022. The complaints were always the same: technical crashes, unoptimized performance, repetitive mission loops. And you know what? I don't give a damn. I still like this game.

Here's the thing. If this game had a rainbow flag on the cover and a lecture about social justice baked into every cutscene, those same outlets would've found a way to bump it up a few points. You know it. I know it. The entire industry knows it. But POSTAL 4 doesn't play that game. It never has, and Running With Scissors wouldn't know how to even if they wanted to. That's exactly why I respect it.

Running With Scissors Doesn't Give a Damn Either

Most developers would've issued a groveling apology, promised a roadmap, and quietly shelved the project. Not these guys. Running With Scissors took every single negative review, every 1/10, every hit piece, and wore them like a badge of honor. They slapped the bad scores right on the Steam page. They mocked the outlets publicly. They leaned into the hatred so hard it became part of the marketing. That's not a developer in crisis. That's a developer who knows exactly who they are and who their audience is.

I'm part of that audience. The counter-culture crowd that doesn't need a committee of sensitivity readers to tell us what's funny. Running With Scissors built POSTAL for people like me, and they've never once pretended otherwise.

The Metacritic Review Bomb Drama

As if the critic backlash wasn't enough, a second wave of drama erupted on Metacritic's user review boards. Players started accusing Running With Scissors of creating fake accounts to flood the platform with perfect 10/10 scores, trying to counter the critical beatdown. Whether it's true or not, it added another layer of chaos to a game that thrives on chaos. The whole situation was peak POSTAL energy.

POSTAL: Bullet Paradise

The most recent developer drama came when Running With Scissors announced a spin-off titled POSTAL: Bullet Paradise. The announcement stirred up the community all over again, proving that this franchise can't stop generating controversy even when it's not trying. Love it or hate it, POSTAL stays in the conversation.

The Stuff Nobody Talks About

Everyone was so busy trashing this game that they forgot to mention the things it actually does well. POSTAL 4 introduced several features that most modern open-world shooters wouldn't dare touch. Running With Scissors doubled down on extreme player freedom, meta-humor, and immersive sim mechanics in ways that deserve more credit than they got.

Multiverse Voice System

In almost every modern game, you get one voice actor for your protagonist and that's it. POSTAL 4 built a multiverse voice selection system that lets you swap the voice and personality of the Postal Dude at any time from the menu. The roster they pulled together is stacked:

• Jon St. John: The legendary voice of Duke Nukem.

• Rick Hunter: The original Dude from Postal 1 and Postal 2.

• Corey Cruise: The Dude from Postal III.

• Zack Ward: The actor who played the Dude in the 2007 live-action Postal movie.

Four different voices spanning the entire franchise history, all in one game. That's a love letter to the fans, and it's the kind of feature that bigger studios with ten times the budget never even consider.

Full Pacifist Run

Games like Grand Theft Auto and Cyberpunk 2077 force you into mandatory lethal shootouts during story missions. POSTAL 4 lets you complete the entire game without hurting a single person. Every mundane or bizarre chore, from signing petitions to fixing sewer leaks, can be solved through non-violent negotiation, stealth, or non-lethal tools like the taser and pigeon distractions. The game tracks it, too. Finish the whole week clean and you earn a "Pacifist" achievement. That's real player freedom, not the watered-down version most AAA studios pretend to offer.

Chaotic Emergent Gameplay

While mainstream shooters kept moving toward heavily scripted, linear set-pieces, POSTAL 4 went the other direction. It's a sandbox of interconnected, ridiculous physics and chemistry rules that you can manipulate however you want. It embraces the kind of chaotic emergent gameplay that immersive sims are built on, except wrapped in the most absurd package imaginable. You're not solving problems the "right" way. You're solving them your way, and the game is built to handle whatever dumb idea you come up with.

Unfiltered Anti-Corporate Satire

Most modern open-world games play it safe to avoid controversy. POSTAL 4 acts as a time capsule of aggressive, unfiltered parody. It takes shots at modern tech culture, corporate greed, gaming media, and political polarization without flinching. There are entire questlines mocking predatory mobile gaming mechanics, cryptocurrency scams, and the absurdity of gig-economy apps through the in-game "Errand Boy" app. It punches in every direction, and it doesn't care who gets offended. That kind of satire barely exists in gaming anymore, and POSTAL 4 is one of the last games willing to do it.

Where to Get It and What You Need

POSTAL 4: No Regerts is available on Steam (PC) and on the PlayStation Store for PS4 and PS5. The base price on Steam sits at around $19.99, and it goes on sale frequently, sometimes as steep as 50% off. You can also grab it in bundles with other POSTAL titles if you want the full franchise experience. Third-party key sites have been spotted selling it for even less.

The game runs on Unreal Engine 4. Here's what you need on PC:

Minimum Requirements:

• OS: Windows 10 (64-bit)

• Processor: 2.5 GHz quad-core

• Memory: 8 GB RAM

• Graphics: DirectX 11 compatible, 2 GB dedicated VRAM

• Storage: 25 GB

• Note: 30 FPS frame lock recommended at minimum specs

Recommended Requirements:

• OS: Windows 10 (64-bit)

• Processor: 4.0 GHz quad-core

• Memory: 8 GB RAM

• Graphics: DirectX 11 compatible, 4 GB dedicated VRAM

• Storage: 25 GB (SSD recommended)

It's not a demanding game on paper, but fair warning: optimization has been one of the biggest complaints since launch. An SSD and a decent GPU go a long way toward keeping it playable.

Final Verdict

POSTAL 4: No Regerts is not a polished game. It's not a technically sound game. It crashed on me, it stuttered, and some of the missions loop harder than a broken record. I'm not going to sit here and pretend those problems don't exist. But underneath all that jank is a game with more personality, more player freedom, and more genuine humor than half the AAA titles that scored three times higher. The multiverse voice system alone is worth the price of admission. The pacifist route is something most studios can't even conceptualize. And the satire hits harder than anything the "safe" games are putting out.

Running With Scissors made a game for their people, told the critics to kick rocks, and kept it moving. I can respect the hell out of that. If you're the type who needs a focus-tested, committee-approved experience, this isn't for you. If you want a chaotic, offensive, genuinely free sandbox that lets you be as peaceful or as unhinged as you want, POSTAL 4 delivers. The "Worst Game of the Year" is one of the most entertaining things I've played, and I'm not sorry about it.