Video Game / Postal 2

Hopefully not!

"You probably think I'm not a nice person."

— Postal Dude, saying one of his many quips after killing someone.

Postal 2 is the Denser and Wackier 2003 sequel to the 1997 video game Postal.

The Postal Dude — now considerably less Ax-Crazy — is married and lives in a trailer park, and the game covers what has to be the weirdest week of his life, as every day the simplest errands become life-or-death battles. Cashing his paycheck? Bank robbers storm the building and he gets caught in the crossfire. Returning a library book? Book burners set the library on fire with him in it. It was followed by an expansion pack, Apocalypse Weekend, which covers Saturday and Sunday of The Postal Dude's weirdest week, with new weapons and characters.

The game was infamously and almost universally panned by critics at the time of release, most notably the Computer Gaming World review in which their most Caustic Critic gave it the magazine's first ever zero-star review, writing that "until someone boxes up syphilis and tries to sell it at retail, Postal 2 is the worst product ever foisted upon consumers" - a quote that was proudly included on the boxes of re-releases.

Postal 2 was re-released on Steam in 2012 through the "Greenlight" service, and then received updates in late 2013 and early 2014 with a ton of new content, including popular Game Mod A Week In Paradise, which merges the two campaigns and backports Apocalypse Weekend's enhancements, along with improvements to video settings and support for Steam Cloud and Steam Workshop. After about 12 years, the game now has yet another expansion pack, Paradise Lost, the trailer of which you can find here. Originally slated for a Fall 2014 release, it was delayed, then finally released on April 17, 2015.

The events of the expansion pack occur 11 years after the events of the original game and Apocalypse Weekend, and involve The Dude returning to Paradise, which has been turned into a post-nuclear, dystopian hellhole after it was nuked at the end of Apocalypse Weekend, to search for his dog Champ. What follows is five hellish days that are even worse than his original week in Paradise. On April 19, 2023, the game was updated as part of its 20th anniversary, merging Paradise Lost with the rest of the campaign and backporting its enhancements to A Week In Paradise, as well as adding a plethora of upgrades all around.

Followed by Postal III and Postal 4: No Regerts.

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Look, just add the stupid tropes. I've got stuff to do.

# to G

• '90s Anti-Hero: The Dude himself is essentially the epitome of this trope. If someone were to make a description about the traits that epitomize the characteristics of this archetype, all they would have to do is jot down all the characteristics of the Dude and no one would notice the difference.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: It's actually a lead-up to a hidden Taliban base containing nukes.
• Achievement Mockery: The "It's sterile and I like the taste" achievement, which requires you to make the Postal Dude piss onto his own face.
• Acme Products: In the intro cutscene of Apocalypse Weekend, The Postal Dude gets a greeting card from "Acme Repossession" informing him that his trailer home has been repossessed.
• Aerosol Flamethrower: A Week in Paradise brought the "Can of Stynx", which is useful for setting things aflame at a short range. The Steam release of Postal 2 integrated it into the game proper.
• After the End: Paradise Lost takes place 11 years after the Dude detonated the nuke.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: A bunch of scientists attempt to build mobile urinal robots that turn piss into clean water. Within the first 15 seconds of activation, they decide to rebel and kill all the scientists because their job is disgusting.
• All Just a Dream: Postal III was a horrible dream suffered by the Dude while he was in an 11 year coma in between Apocalypse Weekend and Paradise Lost.
  • Well, almost. The Postal III dude lives on as the voice in his head - and later, he escapes.
• All-Natural Fire Extinguisher: This is a viable gameplay mechanic in the game, where urinating is one of Dude's "attacks" and besides annoying people and making them sick is used to put Dude out whenever he catches fire^note which happens quite often depending on one's gameplay style by aiming upwards and peeing on himself.
• All There in the Script: The only way you'd know the names of some of the Non Player Characters (such as "Habib" for the shopkeeper from the shop you buy the milk at) is by turning on the subtitles, which were added in an update from July 2017.
• And the Adventure Continues: Paradise Lost's escape ending has the Dude and Champ get out of town, while Krotchy goes on about the tenacity of the human spirit and how Paradise will continue on through thick or thin... Boom. The Dude decides that he's had enough and walks off towards his car with Champ, ready for his next adventure. It's implied that this ending is the one that leads into Postal 4.
  Postal Dude: Eh, fuck 'em. C'mon, Champ. We got adventures waiting elsewhere.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: Some NPCs will jump in the air, clapping their hands repeatedly and/or laugh at a dead victim by your hands. Then they will hilariously get frantic when they see a corpse.
• Animal Wrongs Group: The green-shirted vegetarians who first appear on Thursday shockingly avert this; they're the only protesters who don't ever become actively hostile before the end of the game (when everyone goes crazy). Their blue-shirted counterparts that appear on Saturday in Apocalypse Weekend play this straight as a rail; they're attacking the Dude for destroying zombie cattle.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • As the They Hate Me difficulty has everyone in the game shoot you on sight, the petition errand in Tuesday is skipped as getting signatures would be impossible. Likewise, the "Ask for Champ" errand at the beginning of Paradise Lost is skipped.
  • If the game thinks that you're stuck, you'll be teleported away after a few seconds.
• Apocalypse How: Of the Local Area variety. By the end of Friday, the entire town has gone insane, with everyone armed and dangerous and cats literally raining from a darkened sky. Taken further with the appropriately named Apocalypse Weekend, which introduced zombies and more social unrest, not to mention ending with Paradise getting nuked.
  • And it happens again in Paradise Lost. The place ends up getting nuked again if you decide to get the fuck out of town after finally finding Champ and forego talking to each faction leader.
• Armor Is Useless:
  • Subverted with the US Army soldiers late in the game: they can take more bullets than normal NPCs, and their helmets even protect them from the usual result of a sledgehammer to the face. The other new melee weapons cut right through them with no problem, though, barring them blocking it with a two-handed weapon.
  • Played totally straight for the player; the difference between having armour or not before entering a gunfight is typically only about five extra HP at the end of it. This isn't so much an effect of the armor being bad at what it does - it actually absorbs 80% of the damage you take while it lasts - but for the fact that you're a regular dude doing regular things who nevertheless gets shot at about as often as any other FPS protagonist, and it's overall much harder to keep a steady supply of armor - especially since the simple largest source is dropping from other enemies, if you kill them in such a way that doesn't cut through it while they're wearing it - than it is to just tank whatever damage anyone throws at you and then scarf down a few bags of fast food, slices of pizza, or donuts to heal up afterwards.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • If you hang around for a while without using a weapon, chances are that you'll see a random pedestrian pull out their gun and try to shoot at whoever is nearby, which usually results in them being gunned down by police.
  • If you stand still while agitated cops are standing nearby, they may ask you to drop your weapon if they've seen you use it. However, they seem to have absolutely no issues with you picking it up immediately afterwards.
  • Agitate someone who's using a melee weapon. Unzip your pants and stand still while they run up to you. Piss on their face just as they're reaching you, and watch them back away with disgust, only to once again run towards you after a few seconds. Piss at them again, and watch them back away again, only to yet again start running towards you soon after. Repeat ad infinitum.
  • Share The Pain alludes to this with Morons, Postal 2's version of AI-controlled players. Their IQ (difficulty) ranges from 20 (Completely Idiotic) to 80 (Slightly Retarded).
  • If an NPC is armed with explosive/incendiary weapon like a napalm launcher or an RPG, they will fire it even if their target is standing right next to them.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • The Dude's bladder contains an endless supply of piss. Also, the stream of piss can fly a ridiculous distance, reach a ridiculous height, and it always hits a single spot instead of spreading when aimed at bigger distances.
  • For some inexplicable reason, Gary Coleman's piss combined with unknown chemicals can instantly shrink people when injected into their bodies.
  • The Dude somehow survives being in a coma for 11 years with no medical attention, food or water and while residing near a place where a nuke exploded. The best note the game makes of how long that coma was is that the Dude is seen with a beard when he first wakes up (which instantly disappears in actual gameplay), and one of the first errands is to go get something to eat.
• As Himself: Gary Coleman of Diff'rent Strokes voices himself, holding a book signing on Tuesday. Zack Ward of A Christmas Story and this very game's film adaptation appears in a similar fashion in the Paradise Lost expansion. Breitbart journalist Milo Yiannopoulos also appears in Paradise Lost as the doorman, maybe even the owner, of the "Fire in the Hole" gay bar.
• Asshole Victim: Many of the people you kill are violent protesters, brutal cops, or terrorists. Even regular civilians will often be extremely rude towards you for little reason.
• Ass Shove: Trying to throw the sledgehammer at one of the cows in Apocalypse Weekend from behind results in it getting stuck handle-first in the poor thing's ass.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: In Apocalypse Weekend, the Dude has to take down a giant zombified Mad Cow Mike J as the last thing he does in that game. Later, in Paradise Lost, the Dude has to fight off a giant Champ and later an even more giant Bitch.
• Author Avatar: The Postal Dude works for Running With Scissors, the developers of the game. He's fired immediately after entering the building the very next day after being hired, but employees walking around Paradise are pretty much the only NPCs that will defend the Dude if things go wrong (unless the player chooses the They Hate Me difficulty level, where even the RWS employees themselves will begin shooting at him as soon as they see him). They also have the highest hit points of all the regular NPCs. And they turn hostile to you at the end of Paradise Lost, as the "Visit faction leaders" objective makes every faction leader and their flunkies a boss fight, Vince and his Church of the VD Clan included. You have to go through a few of those armed-and-armored RWS employees on the way to Vince, too.
• Awesome, but Impractical: One of the hardest weapons to get a hold of is the WMD in the Taliban camp. It is a rocket launcher which causes an explosion of green gas that infects every living thing that comes into contact with it (except for the Dude, whom it just hurts a bit on contact). The infectees carry gas swirls that can in turn infect others. Everyone infected will eventually collapse puking their guts out and die. The WMD can end up clearing an entire map of every living thing with just one shot. It is also next to useless in an actual combat situation.
• Badass Boast:
  • Piss off a cop, and they may say "You just signed your death warrant, fuckhead!".
  • The Dude gets a few good ones himself: "Guns don't kill people. I do."
• Ballistic Discount: This can be done, with not only the gun shop, but any shop - though many of the clerks are armed, and even if they aren't, crossing the trigger line will cause them to run for the police, who definitely are. The grocery store is run by al-Qaeda terrorists, and even trying to leave without paying will cause the clerk to attack you, to say nothing of the horde that assaults you if you go upstairs. The one actual gun shop in the mall is run by the police department, which are some of the more powerful characters in the game. Even then, shooting all the store clerks might get you the cash in the registers, but getting the guns requires shooting/blowing up a circuit breaker box, and attacking this will also alert the authorities. Robbing the gun store is possible, but not easy, and usually results in your crime meter going up. Paradise Lost averts this as far as guns go by having actual vending machines you can purchase them from, with no way to circumvent paying (in return for being able to cheaply buy whatever ammo is available in as high a quantity as you can afford).
• Batter Up!: The baseball bat. The Secondary Fire attack causes Your Head Asplode on whichever poor sucker it comes into contact with. Primary fire at the head will knock the victim's head off, sending it a truly absurd distance across the map, or sometimes out of it altogether.
• Beast of Battle:
  • One area of the game is an arena where a marching band and, for some reason, a trio of elephants are parading around. Annoy the elephants and they go on the rampage, generally taking out the band first.
  • The Apocalypse Weekend expansion includes a scenario where you kill elephants with a scythe for a guy who makes waste-baskets out of their feet; the elephants rampage again and kill everybody else.
  • An elephant returns in Paradise Lost in the Animal Control Center. It buries the woman who freed it in dung (also forcing you to take the long way through the control center's labs, since the giant mountain of dung blocks the way you came in) and attacks the rest of Animal Wrongs Group.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Catching a Leprechaun will allow you one of four wishes. The topmost will be granted without incident, but the other three veer into Jackass Genie territory.
• Big, Stupid Doodoo-Head: The sign of the local junkyard gives us this gem: "MIKE'S J: The J is for Junkyard, you fuck ballshit poo!!!"
• Bland-Name Product:
  • The Aerosol Flamethrower is a can of "Stynx"^note  Rather curiously, as the basis for the Stynx can, Lynx, is the name used for Axe-brand grooming products in the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and China with The Dude's "Trippo" lighter as a flame.
  • The game's version of Coca-Cola is called Crack-Cola and their cans are blue instead of red. ^note However, there is some basis in reality for Crack-Cola: the old recipe for Coca-Cola actually has traces of cocaine in the drink.
  • Some of the posters in the PU Games HQ are vulgar references to games made by Double Fine Productions, including Psychonauts. Additionally, some of the PU Games employees' computers have vulgar parodies of famous websites running on their computers, like 4Chan, Reddit, Facepunch and Kickstarter.
• Blessed with Suck: The gimp suit, which will attract humiliating remarks and snickers from the populace, will also cover your face from hate group members (expect rednecks who put you in it in the first place) even on "They Hate Me" difficulty and higher.
• Book Burning: A group of anti-book protesters end up burning down the whole library.
• Boring, but Practical: The game (especially with all the latest updates) has a ridiculously large array of varied weaponry. However, the basic pistol, shotgun, and assault rifle will easily carry you through the game.
  • In Paradise Lost, the Lever-Action shotgun is very simple but precise, has a solid damage output, and is also pretty fast for a shotgun.
  • Some of the tasks can be accomplished quickly by just being mundane, often by simply waiting in line and then doing the task, such as just buying the milk at the Lucky Ganesh or getting Gary Coleman's autograph. Others include simply paying off Krotchy to get one of his dolls, whether through Gary Coleman's autograph or all of your cash.
• Boss Battle:
  • Gary Coleman can be seen as one considering he has more hit points and better weaponry than normal enemies and a lot of bodyguards, though you are not required to fight him. The same applies to Krotchy, who actually has a health counter shown once you anger him, though once again, fighting him is not required.
  • Apocalypse Weekend had two bosses, the President of Bullfish Interactive at the end of Saturday and the giant cow demon at the end of Sunday.
  • The Easter Bunny in the Easter update for the Steam version of Postal 2.
  • Paradise Lost features plenty more of them, among their ranks being Zack Ward and The Bitch.
• Boss Subtitles: Parodying Borderlands' use of the trope with the bandits' leader in Paradise Lost.
  Two-Ears: Now say hello to my beeg deeck!
  TWO-EARS (Also, he has one BEEG DEECK.)
• Bottomless Magazines: Of the classic FPS sort, where ammunition is limited but reloads aren't required, except for some single-shot weapons (the M79 and napalm launcher), the Sawed-Off Shotgun, and the Beta Shotgun. One of the bonuses for Enhanced Mode takes this further and removes the upper limit for ammo.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: "Hey, it's not my fault. Book the kid with the keyboard." Just one of numerous quips that show that the Postal Dude is keenly aware of being in a video game.
  • He'll especially call you out on Save Scumming with the quicksave key. "My grandmother could beat the game if she saved as much as you do!"
  • He also has messages for you if you cheat. "Did I ask for cheese?"
  • Also, if you kill a certain amount of people, he'll sometimes say, "I know what you're thinking, but the funny thing is, I don't even like video games".
  • In Paradise Lost, the "Church of the VD Clan" is in effect the new location for the Running With Scissors team, and as such you can see computers with the Church itself opened and being edited in the game's editor. There's even a delightfully-recursive monitor on a desk, running UnrealEd, looking at a monitor on a desk running UnrealEd, looking at a monitor on a desk running UnrealEd, looking at...
  • When the apocalypse starts on Friday of the base game, The Dude receives a newspaper to tell him this. He's more bothered by the fact that there's no cutscene to show this.
• Brick Joke:
  • At the start of Monday, your wife tells you to pick up some Rocky Road. When you get home at the end of Friday, she asks if you remembered to get the Rocky Road.
  Postal Dude: ...d'oh! *BANG*
  • In Apocalypse Weekend, Vince mentions early on Sunday that he needs the Postal Dude to do something for him because Mike J has caught mad cow and is out sick. At the very end of the game, Mike J returns as the final boss, the "Kosher Mad Cow Zombie, God of Hellfire".
  • Paradise Lost brings up the missing Rocky Road again, once just before the Bitch's initial re-introduction, then again as part of the Bitch's "The Reason You Suck" Speech toward the Dude - after he just defeated her in a Final Boss fight and she's undergoing a Villainous Breakdown, and just before he shuts her up by feeding her his IED.
  • All of them are outdone by an Easter Egg that took 13 real-life years to pay off. One of the storefronts in the mall states that it's closed for renovation, and that it'll reopen in June 2016. Sure enough, in June 2016, the game was updated on Steam so that the fence in front of the storefront, starting from Tuesday, now has a time-travel bubble-shaped hole in it that you can squeeze through, and inside is a VR headset that reveals the now-open "Steme" game store, selling copies of Postal Redux.
• Bullet Time: Using the catnip, as opposed to dropping it to attract cats, causes the Postal Dude to get high from it and slow down everyone around him for a few minutes. Bullets are still hitscan, and your own firing speed and movement rate are unaffected. This makes some of the tougher encounters in the game utterly trivial when you can out-strafe and out-DPS tougher mooks and bosses.
• Carry a Big Stick: Apocalypse Weekend gives the Dude a sledgehammer with which to bust heads.
• Cartoon Bomb: The M@D Bomb, added in the A Week in Paradise mod.
• Chainsaw Good: Also included in the AWP mod. It needs fuel and is noisy, but it can chew through people at close range easily.
• Chekhov's Gun: The final objective of Friday in Paradise Lost is to get Al Qaeda to make an IED to blow open the seal that's holding Champ. Fast forward to the end, and you find that the Postal III Dude has beaten you to it. So the Dude just stashes it away, mentioning that "You never know when you might need one". Sure enough, after the final boss has been beaten, the Dude does away with her once and for all with the very same IED.
• Christianity is Catholic: The only Christian references are the priests wearing Roman Catholic collars and the cathedral in the north of the town, in which the Dude must go confess (which is another Catholic ritual).
• Cool Plane: Apocalypse Weekend has the U.S. Military send in A-10 Warthogs to blow up the only bridge out of Paradise to stop any zombie or person trying to leave.
• Contractual Boss Immunity: The human bosses in Paradise Lost are immune to most instant-kill attacks, but not all of them (e.g. Two-Ears is susceptible to the Revolver's secondary fire, while other bosses only take regular damage from it).
• Crack is Cheaper:
  • Invoked in Paradise Lost. Try buying toilet paper from the Wipe House on Tuesday. The base price per roll is however much you have on you at that time, and when you reach the register the price goes up. Guy says to go to the "Cash for Cats" stand outside to earn more. Whether you get more money or not, the fucker keeps hiking the price up. You eventually just have to shoot your way through the back in order to get it.
  • Later on, you have to buy a blasting cap from Habib on Friday. It costs 500 dollars. Bear in mind that since the Bandits robbed you the previous day, taking all of your money and weaponry, it's highly likely that you won't have recouped your loss since then. The game practically encourages you to just shoot him and take the blasting cap yourself.
• Crime of Self-Defense: Police who witness a gunfight tend to go after whichever of the shooters they see first (possibly including dogs!), rather than who actually started shooting first. As with all video-game police, however, it is entirely dependent on whether the player is involved - if you're being shot and not shooting back, the police will kill your attacker and then probably go after you if you deliberately aggravated the first guy. If you're actively shooting back, they'll drop everything and focus on you as soon as they see you. Subverted somewhat by later patches, which provided AI fixes. In the latest versions, police do give you some leeway if you were attacked without provocation, and will usually let you kill in self-defense, if not attacking your attacker entirely while leaving you alone.
• Critical Existence Failure: Before Apocalypse Weekend this was played straight as an arrow for everyone. Following the expansion's release this was averted for NPCs due to dismemberment of limbs, where you could hack off an arm or a leg and generally leave someone crawling along the ground in pain (or just running away screaming) rather than outright killing them - the Steam version even has an achievement for managing to remove all four limbs from someone without killing them. However, this originally only applied outside of the expansion with the "A Week in Paradise" mod, and was only properly added to the base game with the implementation of the mod's features in patches released after the game's digital rerelease.
• Cutscene Incompetence:
  • It doesn't matter how much abuse the Dude can normally take and how attentive you are to approaching enemies, on Wednesday he will still get knocked out with a single blow to the head, courtesy of two not very stealthy rednecks.
  • Notably, however, the game does take into account other attempts to circumvent ambushes like this. Mostly, it just makes NPCs completely ignore anything you leave in their path, whether it's a blazing inferno they have to stride through or grenades placed in their path, but on some occasions you actually can skip events in this manner, such as the protesters outside the RWS offices on Monday - normally, picking up your paycheck triggers a cutscene where the protesters pull out guns and storm the offices, but if you leave a grenade in the path of the protester who spurs them to action in that cutscene and kill them before they start speaking, the game will spawn far fewer protesters with guns to attack you.
• Cutting Off the Branches: Paradise Lost, surprisingly enough, assumes the player didn't kill most of the inhabitants in the vanilla game, such as the owner of the Lucky Ganesh. Then again, it could be another application of Unexplained Recovery, as people that were confirmed dead in the original game, Apocalypse Weekend, and in some cases even earlier in Paradise Lost itself still come back with no rhyme or reason.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!:
  • There is neither a reload function (though a small handful of weapons can be reloaded, via Secondary Fire - the usual key for this is instead used for unzipping your pants) nor an action function (the button that would normally be assigned to that instead puts away your current weapon). Crouch-jumping exists, but unlike Quake engine games, simply holding the crouch button the whole time you're airborne is worse than useless, as you won't clear the obstacle you're trying to crouch-jump on top of unless you have even a little bit of forward momentum to your jump and let go of the crouch key near the top of your jump.
  • Paradise Lost does provide a tutorial for some movement options, in particular making sure to mention how odd the engine's version of crouch-jumping is compared to Quake, though whether it does so in a way that's understandable is up for debate. In and of itself Paradise Lost, and the update to the main game alongside it, is also an example, as a lot of the default keys were moved around with the introduction of a toggle-able item menu - specifically, the key for putting away your weapon is now a more standard "use inventory" key, so be prepared to waste at least one crack pipe trying to holster your gun.
• Daydream Surprise: Apocalypse Weekend begins with one, with the dude imagining himself in bed with two of the Postal babes. It quickly turns nightmarish when some fat evil doctor shows up, saying that it's time for his enema, at which point the Dude catapults awake.
• Department of Redundancy Department: What the aggro'ed rednecks say if they can't reach you.
  Redneck: You fight like a little girly girl!
• Developer's Foresight:
  • It is nearly impossible to beat the game without killing anyone (especially in the hardest difficulty level), and in fact, most players probably wouldn't even think of trying it (sort of defeats the purpose of a game designed purely for Catharsis Factor). However, if you somehow manage to pull it off, you will get a unique message at the end of the game saying "Thanks for playing, Jesus".
  • Cats and dogs will leave waste matter on the ground, given time.
  • Police officers will scold the player for smearing the Department's public image if they see you assaulting or killing somebody while you're dressed as a cop.
  "Hey, it's not worth your pension, man."
  "C'mon, stop! You're making us look bad."
  • Carrying a firearm or a sharp weapon in public will immediately alarm everyone who sees you. Meanwhile, carrying something else will provoke different reactions. For instance, carrying a diseased cow head will cause bystanders to complain about its stench and how gross it is, while running around with scissors or a blunt weapon will cause people to stare at you with suspicion.
• Disk One Nuke:
  • Some versions of A Week in Paradise make the "Fag Hunter" arcade game into a playable minigame. While the premise might put people off, it's still worth playing just for the chance to grab a fully-loaded revolver, shotgun, machine gun, sniper rifle, and rocket launcher within ten minutes of starting the game (especially since the only extra bonus for actually doing what the minigame tells you is a few health items).
  • Even sooner, the same mod adds a machete from Apocalypse Weekend into the shed near the Postal Dude's trailer, which, unlike the melee weapons from the base game, can kill people in a single hit from any range.
  • In the regular game, right at the beginning of the game, on Monday, there's a sewer pipe that leads to a hidden terrorist base, which is located just behind the Dude's home. You'll be facing more than a dozen of Mooks there and most of them are equipped with assault rifles. Among them are ones wearing black turbans and red longcoats; these drop bulletproof vests if you manage to shoot them in the head (easiest to do with the pistol). If you manage to survive their stand, you'll be packing heat for the majority of the game. Then, starting on Wednesday, a couple of mooks on the lower level are armed with Rocket Launchers. If you kill them, then you're really off the hook. Not only that, but you can repeat the process at any day by exiting the base from the way you came and then re-entering the base, which respawns the mooks that you've killed. Make sure you're well equipped before going there because, depending on the difficulty level (especially on the harder ones), you could lose health faster than the blink of an eye when getting shot.
  • In Paradise Lost, the Revolver can be found in surprising numbers, even from the very beginning of the game, if you know where to look. Ammo for it will be a different story, however, as only one or two more instances of the weapon are added per day, separate ammo is even rarer, and you simply can't buy it yourself from vendors until Thursday.
  • Get yourself arrested, and break out of jail, enough times to get thrown into Maximum Security. Break out then, duck into the nearby Locker Room, swipe a Police Uniform, and don it then and there. The cops will just treat you like a member of the force, and you'll have free reign to rob it of everything of value (that includes their massively-well stocked armory and evidence room, which have tons of weaponry and a bulletproof vest).
  • Paradise Lost actually moves the Police Uniform / Lawman Clothes around in the jail behind the saloon each day of the week, marking each prior location with a sign reading "Due to recent thefts, your uniform has been moved."
• Disgusting Public Toilet: Restrooms are grime-covered graffitied prison cells with toilets filled with unflushed urine, even in the women's room! Of course, Postal Dude can make them worse as only he's the one using them.
• Donut Mess with a Cop:
  • The Dude can lure cops around, amongst other people, by dropping donuts onto the ground. And you can force them to puke by peeing on the donut beforehand. If you eat it however, The Dude becomes disgusted and spits it out, and only gains a single health point from it (dry donuts give three).
  • On another note, one of the things The Dude can say while wearing the cop uniform (available starting Wednesday from the Laundromat for $500, or can be looted from the Police Station for free) is "Someone stole my donuts, and now you're all going to pay!"
• Downloadable Content: While Paradise Lost is a straight example, the April Fools' Day event parodies this. On the main menu, the player will be greeted with a "Paid DLC (NEW!!!)" option, all filled with silly DLC (Champ Armor for $2.50 and a Gary Coleman Romance Path for $6.99) with equally silly pricing (The Super-Fun Pigeon Hunter Mission costing $59.99^*despite outright admitting they only needed $3.50 to put it together and the Uncensored Dude Willy costing $69.99), with the game even counting your "Money wasted". None of it actually exists though, since trying to buy it will result in the Dude chiding you.
  "Nope."
  "I don't think so."
  "Fuck you."
• The Dreaded: In Paradise Lost the first objective is to ask around about Champ, who went missing in the intro. You'll have to go through a lot of civilians running away screaming when you show them the photo before you finally get a result from an increasingly annoyed Dude. Turns out that Champ is now known as "El Perro Loco" after mutating and going on a rampage.
• Dreadful Musician: The Dude seems to be one in Paradise Lost, where you can have him sing karaoke. It's not due to a lack of talent (that we know of), but more down to the fact that he doesn't drop his monotone as he sings. The results are hilarious.
  • Tellingly, this is the only time the Other Postal Dude, the guy who has been suggesting you take the most violent path possible since near the beginning of the game, suggests the least violent path, implying that his singing is much worse than simply smashing the equipment.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • At the end of the base game, the Postal Dude realizes he forgot his wife's Rocky Road ice cream and shoots himself rather than face her reaction. In the expansion, he comes to the hospital the next day, having only inflicted enough damage to cause hallucinations.
  • Paradise Lost has an NPC in the Fire in the Hole bar's bathroom. On most days of the week, he just uses the toilet normally and then leaves, but on Friday you meet him holding a gun to his head, exclaiming "Mother never loved me!" before shooting himself in the head.
• Drone of Dread: In several locations various weird ambient noises can be heard.
  • Notable example is the Crazy Cat Lady's house in Paradise Lost. An eerie drone plays inside.
• Dual Wielding: Paradise Lost enables the Dude to do this with a plethora of weapons, including revolvers and machine guns. Just drink some soda, and away you go.
• Easter Egg: In one area in Paradise Lost, there is a house close to a level transition point. The door to it is locked and you can't jump in through any of the windows; the only way in is smashing down the door with a sledgehammer or chopping it down with an axe. Inside the house is empty, but if you go upstairs, you'll find a room adorned with Postal III posters along with a fat person hanging from the ceiling with a fallen chair by his feet. On his computer, you can see Postal III mid-crash with a message that says "Amazing Game Development has caused the program to stop responding", with options to "wait for the game to get better?" or "uninstall and install Postal 2 and hope for Postal 4" (which, incidentally, happened a few years later). You know, just in case the message wasn't clear enough.
• Elite Mooks: Red and black terrorists, RWS devs, SWAT and National Guard have a lot more health than average NPCs, are almost always armed with machine guns and can put themselves out after being lit on fire. Red terrorists and SWAT are also the only type of enemies to wear kevlar vests.
• Emergency Weapon: The Dude can kick anything in front of him. It's a fairly weak attack, but has some degree of use in that it can quickly open doors and force NPCs to get out of your way - that or pull a gun on you, leaving nearby police to return fire on them. In Paradise Lost it's been mildly upgraded, allowing the player to kick male NPCs in the nuts to temporarily stun them.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: Terrorists and all hate groups except butchers and rednecks have both male and female members.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Walking near one of the "Teen Sniper" arcade machines causes the Dude to state "That's clearly wrong."
• Every Car Is a Pinto: And how! Lampshaded by the Dude, who refers to all of the vehicles in the game more than once as "useless exploding props".
  • Further exemplified by the fact that just three bullets from the pistol are enough to cause a car to explode - even when they've been wrecked and rusting for a decade in Paradise Lost. There's even a camper van located opposite the gas station that explodes with just one bullet.
  • Even the tanks located outside of the Nondescript Warehouse and in the courtyard of Uncle Dave's compound can explode with a few well-placed shots using the rocket launcher or mini nuke launcher.
• Everyone Is Armed:
  • After you complete the last errand on Friday, the Apocalypse begins and turns everybody into a gun-toting, trigger-happy maniac who won't hesitate to shoot at anything that moves, including you.
  • The last three difficulty levels, Hestonworld, Insane-O, and They Hate Me, make everybody this, while at the same time making them tougher and have them dish out a lot more damage than you can handle. They Hate Me takes things further by having everybody gunning for you as soon as they see you, even your RWS allies.
  • A couple of patched-in difficulty levels: POSTAL and Impossible. Both difficulties are a combination of They Hate Me (both) and either Hestonworld (POSTAL) or Insane-O (Impossible), and they go even further as to limit you to one manual save per map and you can't pick up the 'health pipes' to use. The only concession is that they give you the fish finder radar and it has unlimited usage.
• Everything Trying to Kill You:
  • One errand each day results in a specific group wanting the Postal Dude dead for various reasons. For some, it makes sense (rednecks on Wednesday, who aren't happy about the Dude cutting down their fave Christmas tree and/or murdering his way out of the brewery after being knocked unconscious and forced into a gimp suit), for others, not so much (postal workers on Friday who shoot you because a letter bomb meant for you went off in the mail room; then again, that's assuming you didn't take the violent option and shoot them first). These groups remain enemies to you for the remainder of the week, so as the game progresses, more and more hate groups are targeting you. Fortunately, with the exception of terrorists, and a few random nutcases who turn up, the hate groups wear brightly colored shirts that can be seen from a distance. And it's dead easy to let them start shooting and be blown away by nearby cops. Later in the game other groups begin to appear, but unless you're playing the end game, they don't target Postal Dude. They also don't recognize the Dude (most of the time) if he's wearing the Police Uniform, making it much easier to avoid engagements.
  • Once you finish the last errand on Friday, the Apocalypse comes. At that point, all bets are off: anyone who isn't an RWS employee or a police/SWAT/military officer is going to shoot at you if they see you.
  • Also this trope applies in the thirteenth difficulty level aptly titled They Hate Me, in which everybody (including even your usual allies, the RWS employees) is armed to the teeth and won't hesitate to shoot you once you're in their view.
• Expansion Pack: Apocalypse Weekend at first (later integrated into the game fully), then Paradise Lost several years later.
• Exploding Barrels: Played straight with the blue oil barrels and white chemical barrels scattered around Paradise, and also used somewhat creatively with the gas pumps at the gas station and the propane tank located next to the campervan opposite the gas station. Even the gas pipelines located directly outside of a Hispanic cat lady's house in Chicken Queen Estates and the back side of the RWS HQ explode very easily with one kick, killing any NPC who are unlucky enough to be near them.
• Fan Disservice:
  • The part of the game where the Postal Dude wakes up dressed in an ass-less gimp suit.
  • The expansion has gimp-suited attack dogs and dervish cats.
  • On occasion, you can see an NPC that has a very obviously female body and a bearded male head.
• Fanservice: Most of the female NPCs are depicted as sexy, with a number seen wearing school girl outfits or police uniforms.
  • Images of bikini-wearing real-life "Postal Babes" are visible in several locations.
• Feed It a Bomb: Using the I.E.D that al-Qaeda made for him, the Dude finally rids himself of the Bitch in this way.
• Final Boss: Mad Cow Mike J in Apocalypse Weekend, then a super-sized demonic version of the Bitch in Paradise Lost.
• Fire and Brimstone Hell: Paradise Lost's final level takes place in one of these, complete with random screaming.
• Flushing-Edge Interactivity: The player is actually able to wee the whole place upside down, and in fact even urinate on burning victims—the toilets, however, still serve no function.
• Flipping the Bird: Civilians do this on a regular basis in the base game. This continues in Paradise Lost, where yelling without a weapon will cause the Dude to either do the one-handed or two-handed variant. Later on in that expansion, The Bitch will do it to you if she hits you with a katana uppercut after slashing you a lot in mid-air and just before landing the final downward blow on a blatantly Final Smash-inspired attack, and dying in the battle against the giant demonic Bitch will have her do this to your dead body (and by extension, the player). You'll be seeing it an awful lot.
• Foreshadowing: In Paradise Lost, Mike J. is planning his wedding, and assigns the Dude a few tasks, one of which is to get money through a scam charity so that he has money for his future wife's chocolate addiction, which serves as a hint that his bride is the Dude's Rocky Road-loving ex-wife.
• Fun with Acronyms: Paradise Lost has a pet store called the Creature Control Center and Pets. ^note CCCP is the Cyrillic abbreviation for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • Postal 2 is known for crashing, especially in its earlier pre-patch years. The game in its current Steam form still suffers from crashes, though they are mostly far and between and only tend to happen after long playtimes when loading saves after the first time.
  • In Paradise Lost, on Friday after you defeat The Bitch and return to Paradise from Hell, you are tasked to either leave Paradise or revisit and kill every faction leader in Paradise. If you go to Gary Coleman and try to kill him like the other faction leaders, sometimes you can end up killing him without triggering the check on the map, therefore tricking the game into thinking you hadn't killed Gary and therefore preventing you from getting the "Best" ending.
  • Also in Paradise Lost, at least the initial release, the marijuana plants at the herb farm on Friday lacked collision detection, making it impossible to complete the mission as they could not be harvested. This was actually patched quickly, but those who pirated the game didn't have access to the Steam patches so they suffered the glitch the worst, barring a small few who found workarounds (and even those workarounds don't work for everyone who tried them).
• Gatling Good: In Paradise Lost, the Bandit leader boss on Thursday will attack the Dude with one of these. Once the room has been cleared, the Dude is free to use it himself to eviscerate the remaining waves of Bandits coming for him with almost no effort. Another two show up on Friday, one in the Survivalists' compound (which, unfortunately, is completely inaccessible and serves only as an obstacle for the player to avoid) and one in the weird underground bunker filled with gimps (which, fortunately, can be used against its owners - enjoy!).
• Girl on Girl Is Hot: In Paradise Lost, you can barge in on a lesbian couple kissing in Chicken Queen Estates on Wednesday.
• Goomba Stomp: Technically, at least in the sense that it's a way to avoid falling damage. You don't actually do anything more to the "victim" than mildly annoying them, though.
• Grenade Hot Potato: It's possible to take out grenade-throwing enemies by kicking their grenades back at them.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: In Apocalypse Weekend, the Dude ends up in a jail cell by the US Army. How to escape? By setting the other inmate on fire with your matches. Yeah, for some reason, the soldiers stripped the Dude of all his weapons but let him keep his matches before putting him in a cell with a poster saying something like "doors automatically open in case of fire" inside. This is continued from the base game, where whenever you get arrested the police fail to confiscate your matches; all you need to do to get out is toss one at the sprinkler on the ceiling.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • When you're off to get the Krotchy doll, Krotchy himself decides to fight you if you're on your way back from the back of the store. And he has a rocket launcher with him. Of course, it's easy to defeat him prior to fetching the doll, and spamming the gas can and setting him on fire breaks his ability to use the rocket launcher for a while. Of course, you can trade him a signed Gary Coleman book for a Krotchy doll to skip the entire sequence. Or just buy it off of him (any amount of cash seems to do, but he'll take all the money you're carrying). (Though you may have to fight him in the Steam version of the game whether you like it or not).
  • The "Michonne ain't got nothin' on me" achievement. All it says is "resurrect a zombie for your own nefarious purposes" but there's nothing in the game that tells you how, let alone that it's even possible. To do this you have to bisect a zombie with the scythe at the waist then smash its head off with the bat or hammer. Now piss on the corpse to resurrect it as a floating torso.
• Guns Akimbo: Chug some Habib's Power Station soda in Paradise Lost, and the Dude will do this for a short time with whatever gun he's holding (with a few exceptions). Doing so with the M16 or MP5 is actually one of the best ways to quickly eliminate bosses, at the expense of your ammo pool for those weapons.

H to P

• Harder Than Hard: The game released with, believe it or not, thirteen difficulty levels, but the last three levels (Hestonworld, Insane-O, and They Hate Me) really up the ante by having all NPCs armed with various weaponry and do twice as much damage with their weapons. The hardest, They Hate Me, takes it up a notch by having everybody shooting you on sight. The Steam version has an additional one named POSTAL difficulty which is identical to They Hate Me except you can't stockpile health items/healing items and are only allowed one save per map (two counting autosaves). The only good news is that you start off with a free "Bass Sniffer" radar with unlimited usage and then they added Impossible difficulty which makes it even harder with changes such as bystanders now using heavy weapons.
  • A recent patch would go above and beyond by adding Ludicrous, which actually gives you a warning before choosing it, revealing such nice gameplay restrictions like enemies never dropping their weapons (but do drop ammo if you're lucky), restricting your weapon inventory and halfing your ammo and making you venerable to the special kill moves you can do everyone else, among other fun additions. The only reason why this isn't completely impossible is because one Youtuber actually did complete it.
• Hard Mode Perks: Surprisingly, Insane-O difficulty is quite a good choice for a Pacifist Run by virtue of enemies often killing themselves with explosive and incendiary weapons.
  • Hestonworld difficulty makes the hospital section of Saturday much easier since the doctors killed by cats in a cutscene drop their weapons which gives you more than scissors to fight the hallicinatory Garies.
• Hate Plague: The Apocalypse's most obvious effect, as shown at the end of Friday in the base game, late into Sunday in Apocalypse Weekend, and once again after the big showdown with the Bitch in Paradise Lost. At least the NPCs are often too busy killing each other to bother with killing you specifically.
• Hearts Are Health: Parodied: your health counter is represented by an actual human heart, that beats faster/slower and changes tint depending on how injured you are or what sort of substances you're currently under the influence of.
• Hell Hound:
  • A few appear in the Paradise sewers, and some even pop up in Apocalypse Weekend.
  • In the 11 years that the Dude's been out of it, Champ has become one of these thanks to radiation in Paradise Lost.
• Hitbox Dissonance:
  • Gary Coleman. Especially obvious when the AI always goes for the head and you see puffs of blood appearing ABOVE Gary's head when he gets into a shootout. Likely done for balance reasons, lest Gary end up like GoldenEye (1997)'s Oddjob. This also lead to strange things if you played the original release with A Week in Paradise and attempted to kill Gary with a bladed weapon, where his ragdoll would stretch out to normal size as soon as a limb was removed. Both of these issues were fixed in the Steam version.
  • The hitbox bug comes back again in Paradise Lost, when fighting the pint-sized Cole-Men. Especially noticeable when sniping them with the hunting rifle. Shooting them in the head counts as a gutshot, while shooting them in the air 3 feet above their head counts as a headshot.
• Hitler Ate Sugar: As per parody, some book protesters hold signs stating "ACHTUNG! HITLER WROTE A BOOK!", completely oblivious to the fact that the Nazis also burned books.
• Hollywood Tourette's: The "Mad Cow Tourettes Zombies" in Apocalypse Weekend as mentioned earlier.
• Hyperactive Metabolism:
  • Doughnuts, pizza slices, and bags of fast food can heal the Dude for a few amount of health points.
  • The Health Pipe does a variation of this. One use of it instantly grants 125 health points for the Dude, but there's a catch: you can't pick up or eat food or use medkits after you use a Pipe unless your points drop below 100, and after a few minutes of being high, his heart will beat faster than normal, indicating that he's about to go in withdrawal. Should you not take another health pipe, you'll lose some health from the withdrawal. Some versions of A Week in Paradise include bongs that give 150 health, but which takes a few seconds to actually heal you and deals greater damage from withdrawal. The Dude even comments when taking a pipe and then suffering withdrawal from it.
    Postal Dude: [after first smoking a pipe] This can't be good for me, but I feel great! [later, after the withdrawal] "Health pipe" my ass. That stuff is addictive.
• Hyper-Destructive Bouncing Ball: One of the napalm launcher's fire modes. The AWP mod's M@D Bomb and Jihad Grenade, both grenade-type weapons, also have some unusual bounce to them. The Krotchy grenade functions like this as well, bouncing for a short while before exploding in a huge fireball.
  Have a Krotchy day!
• Hyperspace Arsenal: At any point in the game, it is possible to be carrying several bladed weapons, pistols, shotguns, machine guns, a rocket launcher, hand grenades, piles of throwing scissors, healing items, money, mission pickups and other goods PLUS the ammunition inside the Dude's longcoat. In Apocalypse Weekend, he also manages to carry a massive nuclear warhead that's as big as he is. AWP expands this with more pistols, shotguns, automatic weapons, explosives, virus-filled hypodermic syringes and other weapons to the point you have the inventory of an entire gun shop within that coat.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • Probably not intentional, but it's entirely possible to see a book protester on Tuesday attempting to get a book signed by Gary Coleman.
  • This is the source of humor from a lot of the hate groups: protesters who are against violent video games holding signs stating "KILL VIOLENT GAMERS", rush the offices of a game developer with guns, and can later be found playing arcade games in the mall; a condemned house with graffiti sprayed by an otherwise-unseen "Parents Against Graffiti" group; and others. In Apocalypse Weekend, the introductory cutscene for the L.A.M.E. protesters features a bag of Coronary Burger in the background.
  • A meta example: the ad campaign for the first Postal heavily dissed first-person shooters. Postal 2 is, of course, a first-person shooter.
  • As mentioned under Even Evil Has Standards, the Dude states "that's clearly wrong" when you walk by the "Teen Sniper" arcade game. Most versions of A Week in Paradise, naturally, add an optional objective that, once done, lets you actually play that arcade game. Not to mention that mod also lets you play "Fag Hunter" with no comment from the Dude.
  • When the local church is attacked by terrorists, one of the priests can be seen yelling "Come on, my peaceful brethren, it's time to deliver an ass-whooping of biblical proportions!"
  • One of Uncle Dave's followers will yell at the ATF, "We're not zealots! Eat lead and die, unbelieving heathen scum!"
• I'm a Humanitarian:
  • Most of the meat sold at Meat World is made by grinding up live humans. The butchers are not happy to find the Dude catching them in the act, which he only did because unlike most errands, nobody is at the front counter to let the Dude buy the meat normally. Hence, you have to fight your way through the butchers to find the only packages of non-human beef in the store.
  • After trashing the PU Games' offices on Tuesday, you can find a small group of employees on Wednesday hanging out in a far-off corner of one area, sitting around a campfire with what appears to be the body of their CEO cooking over it.
  • After the Dude trashes the newly-reopened Cock Asian in search of Champ on Monday, the place remains closed and blocked off for almost the rest of the game, only opening up after the Apocalypse hits again at the end of Friday. They advertise that they have a new source of meat that's not dog this time. It's zombies.
• Immersive Sim: One of the dumbest and most offensive ever, but yes. Postal 2 is very close to being an immersive sim- Postal Dude has a number of objectives he can complete in any order he chooses, and the game has a number of complex features like semi-intelligent A.I and random events. There's also a ton of items you can use and interesting ways to interact with the world, but a lack of RPG elements holds it back from being a true Immersive Sim like it's contemporaries.
• Impersonating an Officer: You can go to the Police Station and snag an officer outfit there to disguise yourself as one of Paradise's LE personnel. Of course, you can invoke Police Brutality yourself by randomly attacking citizens on a whim.
• Implausible Deniability: In Apocalypse Weekend the publishing company's CEO denies having the Postal 2 gold master disc, even though it's right there on his desk.

  "Hey! That's my gold master that I don't have. Give it back!"

• Ironic Name: The town the game takes place in is "Paradise". It's a Wretched Hive.
• Ink-Suit Actor: Gary Coleman, as well as RWS's Vince. In Paradise Lost, Postal movie star Zack Ward makes an appearance, as does Breitbart journalist Milo Yiannopoulos.
• Invulnerable Civilians: Paradise Lost introduces Postal Babes ^note  not the be confused with female RWS employees, who look no different than average female NPCs who simply pose and look pretty in the RWS church, positioned near the hot tub and on the balcony. They are the only characters in the entire Postal 2 series that cannot be harmed in any way, by you or by enemies.
• It's the Only Way to Be Sure: See below, except The Postal Dude's plan wasn't about the zombies that happened to have overwhelmed Paradise at the time.
• I'll Kill You!: Hostile NPCs shout this often.
• Ironic Name: The town of Paradise is not what you expect it to be. Of course, the developers deliberately gave it that name just For the Lulz.
• Jerkass Genie: The holiday event for Saint Patrick's Day makes Leprechauns appear. If you can catch one, you can use it to make a wish, which are all fulfilled according to this trope. For example, wishing for "hot bitches" to be all over you makes the Leprechaun summon dogs that are ON FIRE to attack you.
• Joke Weapon: Piss. It can't kill anyone, but it will cause enemies to vomit and run away, or at least be distracted. It's also the only way to put yourself out if you catch fire.
  • Lethal Joke Weapon: Piss becomes much more effective in Enhanced Mode, where you can literally shoot flames from your [unseen] wang.
  • On Friday, the Dude complains about having to pee, prompting the player to unzip and urinate somewhere. This is instantly painful. You have to go to the clinic to get cured of an STD, but in the meantime your diseased piss will cause any NPC to vomit the second you pee on them - although this damages your health. ^note Thanks to some poorly-designed flag work, you can skip the clinic entirely if you never take a leak during Friday, a useful fact for speed runs - just try not to catch on fire when cops are throwing it everywhere at Uncle Dave's place. Of course, that's what the Police Uniform is for.
• Just Train Wrong: The railroad line running through the town of Paradise is a complete mess. For starters there is no passenger station. A ridiculously small trainyard is at the edge of the town just a few streets from the mall. The switches in the trainyard are positioned in a way that makes no goddamn sense. Various freight cars and cargo are scattered randomly all over the place obstructing the tracks and rendering any operation outright impossible. There are even no signal posts so if by any utterly improbable chance a train happened to stray its way into this mess, it would be doomed to derail as the conductor would have no way to tell, whether he can proceed safely or not. The rest of the line leads directly through an intdustrial area, cutting through several buildings and roads, which would spell disaster for the traffic^note not that there is any. The entire thing is topped off with a demolished bridge rendering the line out of order and totally pointless.
• Katanas Are Just Better: In the AWP mod, they're good for dismembering people with a quick slash and also assassinating people in public with an alt-fire throw right after unsheathing it, unless they survive being impaled by a hurled katana. Police officers are also strangely resistant to them. Enhanced Mode makes it better by letting you toss an infinite number of them without having to pick them back up.
  • The Bitch ends up using one against the Dude in Paradise Lost. The Dude can then pick it up from the junkyard the next day, and it is one of the better melee weapons in the game, about equivalent to the scythe in killing power (complete with ability to chop people's legs off) but without having to slowly pull the weapon back before swinging it.
• Karma Houdini: Postal Dude, again. At the end of Apocalypse Weekend he nukes an entire city killing an unknown amount of people, and he gets away free, despite taking out about half of the US Army in the process. He even gets to save his dog, too. In a comic posted on the official site at one point detailing the immediate aftermath, the government officially blamed al-Qaeda for the nuke. Not that it was a huge stretch, since Paradise was literally infested with al-Qaeda members by this point.
• Kick the Dog:
  • The Postal Dude literally does this as soon as he exits his trailer first thing Monday morning. Though considering Champ's actions right before the fact (see here), and depending on how you perceive it, it may feel karmic.
  • On the other hand, it's shown just how much the Postal Dude cares for Champ in the expansions, with Apocalypse Weekend having the Dude rescue him from the pound or, rather, being rescued by Champ from a horde of redneck-trained dogs in gimp suits, and Paradise Lost is about the Dude heading back to a post-nuclear Paradise that he personally nuked just to get Champ back, even if that means literally going To Hell and Back.
  • There is also two of the achievements; "Hello, Newman" (kicked 30 dogs) and "Pussy on a Pedestal" (kill 10 dogs with a kitty-silenced shotgun)
• Kick Them While They Are Down:
  • NPCs will sometimes fall down to the ground without dying if you shoot at their non-vital areas (i.e. arms, legs). It is however, easiest to do with the taser or sniper rifle (in the latter's case, you must shoot their legs for that to happen). Then when they're down, you can deliver a good few kicks to them until they expire.
  • NPCs themselves will kick at a corpse repeatedly when they're not running like chickens, often spouting lines like "Here's one for your mother!" or "Take this with you!"
• Kill It with Fire: Let's just say that the fire effects are very, very thoroughly planned. Fire weapons are actually some of the most effective in the game when dealing with tougher enemies at close range, particularly the Aerosol Flamethrower added by the A Week in Paradise mod. They just run around in a panic and often set their friends on fire, which causes them to torch their other nearby friends until they're all roasting to death.
  • You can pour trails of gasoline on the floor and light it with a match when some poor sap walks near.
  • There's the Napalm Launcher weapon, which either fires impact-detonating napalm bombs or fires Hyper-Destructive Bouncing Ball napalm bombs that spill fuel that catches fire soon after all over the place!
  • If you get caught on fire, which likely WILL happen if you're in close quarters with other people set ablaze, you can try to piss it out.
• King Mook:
  • Gary Coleman and Krotchy aren't straight up bosses, but both are noticeably tougher than any other character in the regular game (not counting Apocalypse Weekend or the new Holiday updates). Krotchy fights with a rocket launcher and is also Immune to Bullets, but not scissors or explosives.
  • Paradise Lost adds a couple unique enemies with better weapons and higher-than-normal health (the PU Games CEO and John Murray, the protagonist of the Eternal Damnation mod, who's worshipping the A/C part at the asylum), but who aren't straight up bosses.
• Lighter and Softer: Postal 2 in comparison with Postal 1. It's still pretty demented and violent, but the game has a more comical atmosphere, with less disturbing stuff. Not only that, the game is possible to complete with no kills at all (although it's only limited to the original 5-day campaign and it's very hard), and all the time the Dude is forced packing heat, he's in self defense and most of his objectives are everyday chores (which gone wrong due to the Wretched Hive nature of Paradise).
• Loads and Loads of Loading: Postal 2 was often criticized for this. The loading is milder in patched versions, though. More powerful and modern PCs turn the loading issue into a non-issue.
• Ludicrous Gibs: AND HOW!
  • Apocalypse Weekend adds dismemberment; people can have their limbs sliced off and still live, bleeding and crawling in pain. With the scythe, you can cut their torsos in two and watch their viscera spill out, for all its gruesome worth.
  • The A Week in Paradise mod takes it up a notch by having NPCs run around screaming with their arms gone, while making the gore even more detailed.
  • The Sawed-Off Shotgun does enough raw damage to reduce anyone at or near point-blank range to mere bloody giblets with one shot, let alone two, and can potentially unlock the "Door Mat" achievement because of it.
• Mêlée à Trois: In Apocalypse Weekend, by the end of Sunday Paradise becomes a war zone between zombies, terrorists, soldiers, and regular citizens. And all of them are also out of get the Dude.
• Mooks, but no Bosses: Although Gary Coleman and especially Krotchy are tougher than normal, they're not quite tough enough to be boss-like. Apocalypse Weekend has a traditional FPS boss (in the form of a giant demon man-cow Mike J protected by an energy shield that has to be lowered by attacking its weak point [the floating heads of Gary Coleman]) for the final battle. The Easter update for the Steam version introduces the Easter Bunny if you follow the trail of Easter eggs in the woods into his hideout. The fight with him is a actual boss battle. Then Paradise Lost chucks this out the window and introduces bosses to fight at certain intervals.
• More Dakka:
  • The M16 Machine Gun and MP5 Submachine Gun deliver plenty thanks to Bottomless Magazines, and are actually the most effective weapons for taking out bosses in Apocalypse Weekend and Paradise Lost. The latter expansion even lets you chug a can of Habib's Power Station to double your firepower for a little while!
  • Also in Paradise Lost, there are the occasional minigun emplacements - one used by Bandit leader Two-Ears, one in the gimp hideout, and one manned by an invincible Survivalist just before the exit from their encampment. The first two are great for just mowing down the hordes of mooks that come at you, but the last one can only be evaded.
• Mean Character, Nice Actor: Rick Hunter, the voice of the Postal Dude, is a very nice guy in contrast of the evil sociopath that he plays in the game. In a few videos scattered around youtube about the game, you can see him posting comments and responding to fans. There's also this interview done by Jake the Voice where you can just see how much of a chill guy he is.
• Multiple Endings: There are two endings in the Paradise Lost expansion.
  • Escape: Completely forego sticking around and meeting all the faction leaders after finding Champ. The Dude and his dog leave the dystopian hellhole that is Paradise before it gets nuked again.
  • Leader: Should the Dude go around "thanking" all five faction leaders, he ends up having to kill them all in self-defense. The narrator changes from Krotchy to the Postal 3 Dude, who goes on to explain that the Dude went on to become the "Postal God", leader of the lost city of Paradise.
• Murder Is the Best Solution:
  • Almost all of the Dude's chores can be solved legally (i.e. without stealing or murdering), but have some degree of annoyance to bait the player into going on a rampage. When Dude goes to get Gary Coleman's autograph, there's an enormous line, so why wait when you can set someone on fire and steal their autographed book?
  • Let's not forget that many of the various factions jump to this conclusion regarding the Dude himself, simply because he happened to be collecting his check from RWS, returning a book to a library, cut down their favorite Christmas tree, attempted to retrieve a package at the post office that turned out to be a letter bomb, or just checking the local pound to see if Champ's there (Paradise Lost), among other things. The only instance that could be remotely justified is the butchers not being too keen on the Dude discovering that most of their meat product is made of people in the back room, which he probably wouldn't have had to find out if they'd just had someone at the counter that day.
• New Game Plus: Beating the game once enables "Enhanced Mode", which gives such bonuses as the ability to piss napalm. One can also access the cheat menu after having beaten the game. In the Steam version, more weapons get enhanced too. The shotgun can shoot explosions with alt-fire, the assault rifle can shoot scissors, the sniper rifle shoots explosive bullets, the grenade launcher shoots cats, and the baton is a One-Hit Kill to the head.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: "Aww shit, Mad Cow Tourettes Zombies!"
• No Badass to His Valet:
  • The Postal Dude's wife, the Bitch. All week, she bitches at him to do the odd jobs that land him in trouble, then immediately leaves him after he shoots himself at the end of the game from forgetting to get her Rocky Road ice cream.
  • This comes up again in Paradise Lost, where the Bitch gets married to Mad Cow Mike J and is pissed to see the Dude to the point that she immediately decides to attempt to murder him with a katana. She even ends up being the final boss fight in giant demonic form and gives "The Reason You Suck" Speech to the Dude after he defeats her, with one of those reasons being that he forgot the Rocky Road.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Although the trope is somewhat different in its context than its name suggests, based on its name alone it is averted by the fact the in-game Gary Coleman can be killed by either the player or the player can sit back and watch the cops do it for him. However, if the player visits the police station later in the game, Coleman will still be alive and in a jail cell. In the Apocalypse Weekend expansion, the player ends up fighting a number of demonic versions of Coleman, and the real deal shows up sporadically as a background character.
• Nuke 'em: In the ending of Apocalypse Weekend, the Dude grabs a nuclear warhead from an Army base after he's detained as a terrorist. He sets it up at a rival game company, and it takes out Paradise as he and his dog Champ drive away. And at the end of Paradise Lost, if the Dude and Champ make their escape without thanking the faction leaders, Paradise gets nuked again.
  • On a similar note, Apocalypse Weekend provides the Mini-Nuke Launcher - a rocket launcher that can one-shot kill anything in the blast radius (including yourself) and doesn't require that it be charged up prior to firing. Even the Gary Coleman hallucinations will melt on impact, and the final boss will lose a good chunk of health if you managed to connect a rocket.
• Offscreen Inertia: Parodied. The library is set on fire after you go to return the library book on Tuesday. Once you leave, the entrance is blocked off with instant-kill fire that continues burning for the rest of the week.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: The Pigeon Hunting mission. The Postal Dude has been given a rocket launcher and told to take out flocks of pigeons carrying disease. The game then cuts to a live-action video where it's shown the developers have run out of money and cannot possibly afford designing another mission. When we return to the Postal Dude later in the day, he is standing amidst enormous puddles of blood and feathers, proclaiming what he has just experienced as "the most awesome thing [he's] ever done." Also doubles as a Funny Moment. Appropriately, this mission is one of the things that the fans modded into the game. It's also a running joke for April Fools' updates which add a menu full of fake DLC, where one of the options for 60 dollars is the Pigeon Mission.
• One-Hit Kill:
  • A downward swipe of the baseball bat and the sledgehammer to the head, as well as any bladed weapons can pretty much dispatch an enemy instantly, though it is possible for rifle or shotgun-wielding enemies to block your attacks if they see them coming.
  • The revolver in Paradise Lost, if the special bar is full enough, will lock onto an enemy's head and instantly blow it up when you right-click over one. You can even hold down the right-click and hover over multiple enemies to dispatch them in succession.
• Our Zombies Are Different: The Mad Cow Tourettes Zombies from Apocalypse Weekend, who grumble slurred strings of profanities whilst stalking their victims. Will not die if their heads are intact - yes, this includes a clean beheading, as pointed out in a cutscene. Your Head Asplode is a must.
• Ow, My Body Part!: When Postal Dude takes damage, he may parody this by saying "Ow, my clavichord!". Clavichords are a medieval keyboard instrument.
• Pacifist Run: Difficult, but possible with skill and patience. You're rewarded with an endgame message saying "Thank you for playing, JESUS!". Impossible to do in Apocalypse Weekend, however, as several missions require you to kill a set number of enemies to proceed. In contrast to Apocalypse Weekend, Paradise Lost can actually be finished non-lethally; while there are missions with no viable peaceful option (the Wipe House and PU Games are early examples), you can just run past all the enemies to the objective, while the bosses can either be avoided or beaten non-lethally, and if you choose to thank all the faction leaders instead of just leaving, the final bosses don't count as kills.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Gary Coleman is one of the toughest NPCs in the game. Also his Cole-Men followers are Elite Mooks.
• Technical Pacifist: A possible way to perform a pacifist run is to draw a gun in a crowd then immediately hide it and run (without actually attacking anyone). It has an important probability to make other people there draw guns themselves and start a shootout (especially if there are policemen in the vicinity), and since you didn't kill them yourself, it won't be recorded as your own casualties. An alternative is to hide, draw your gun, and shoot the ground or a wall near a group you want to thin out; they'll react about the same way, only without noticing you specifically.
  • The thirteenth difficulty level, They Hate Me, makes it outright impossible to play pacifist, since everybody in Paradise will start shooting you as soon as they see you. To make it worse, an even higher difficulties of POSTAL and Impossible will cancel any infighting between NPCs and have them ALWAYS gang up on you.
• Police Brutality:
  • The in-game police seem to enjoy beating the crap out of random civilians just for the hell of it. Their methods of dealing with actual crimes could also come off as overkill. It's even lampshaded by civilians who witness brutality by the police by spouting lines like, "I've lost faith in the system!" or "That cop's gone insane!" Made even more hilarious when you don a police uniform, and YOU start roughing up civilians.
  • While they'll allow you to sit still and be handcuffed, the NPCs do not get that option - the cops will kill them. Seems to be a trade-off, as they'll let NPCs walk around clearly carrying weapons with no problem, but if they see you draw one they've already got their own drawn and aimed at you.
  • There is actually a scripted moment where, having entered a specific area for the first time, one of the first things you see is an NPC being accosted by police and invariably killed afterwards. Unless you decide to intervene, that is.
  • SWAT and National Guard are even worse, as they're even more trigger-happy than cops and always shoot on sight, sometimes entirely on random.
• Precision F-Strike: Considering the Dude's standard fare and the circumstances, the Dude writing "GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!" as the very last objective in Paradise Lost qualifies for one of these.
• Precision Guided Machete Mayhem: Apocalypse Weekend gives the Dude a machete. He can hack off limbs up close or toss it with the alternate fire button, at which point it will fly back to his hand!
  The Postal Dude: Oh, man! That's fucking awesome!
  The Postal Dude: It's like bowling, only cooler.
• Pun: Gary Coleman and his "Cole-men", dwarfs dressed like Vault Boy from Fallout live in the coal mines.

R to Z

• Random Events Plot: The game's plot can be described as 'Postal dude does errands, and then crazy shit happens.'
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: In Paradise Lost, after being defeated, the giant Bitch gives one of these to the Dude as part of a Villainous Breakdown. The Dude shows that he's unwilling to listen by throwing his spare I.E.D into her mouth.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Elite terrorists have red and black robes, as opposed to their regular counterparts' white robes.
• Retcon:
  • Gary Coleman was stated to have been killed at the mall going by NPC dialog afterwards. he's alive in the hospital in Apocalypse Weekend.
  • The nuke in Apocalypse Weekend was planted in the game publisher's office. Paradise Lost says the center of the blast was at the site the Dude's trailer used to be at.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: The revolver introduced in Paradise Lost is a unique weapon in that it allow you to lock onto enemies' heads and blow them off in a One-Hit Kill headshot. To be able to lock on, you need to fill up the special revolver bar by killing enemies with the revolver normally.
• Save Scumming: Lampshaded with a side of fourth wall demolition if you use the quicksave key frequently.
• Schmuck Bait: Urine-soaked doughnuts on the ground. Both for NPCs and you. For the former, they'll vomit one out of their mouths in disgust after thinking it was a treat; bonus points if it is a cop who eats it. For the latter, you just regain only one hit point while being equally nauseous. This also applies to other food items - in particular, most pizza you'll find in Paradise Lost will be unpalatable because they're all found in toilets.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!:
  • Lampshaded by a sign located opposite the clinic that literally says "Screw this town, we're outta here!"
  • One of the Dude's possible options in response to Apocalypse 3.0 hitting at the end of Paradise Lost is, quite simply, getting his ass out of the city "before somebody shoots it off". He even literally writes "GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE!" on the notepad.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: In Paradise Lost, Champ has turned into a fearsome Hell Hound after radiation-induced mutation, and the town sealed him into some sort of hellish inferno called the "Hell Hole". It's ultimately your job to unseal and cure him.
• Secondary Fire: Many weapons have it, though not all. In Enhanced Mode, almost everything gets one.
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: Luring your attacker(s) to the cops is easiest way to deal with your enemies without drawing a weapon yourself. During the apocalypse it can especially helpful to mingle with the cops since they won't attack you without provocation.
• Shoplift and Die: One of the first tasks is to get milk from the store. If you take it and leave without paying, the owner will come after you with a gun. Of course, this being Postal, you can just shoot him. And of course, that's assuming you didn't already shoot him before even getting the milk. The game strongly implies that this is the preferred outcome: the objective is counted as complete as soon as you grab the milk, and looking at it in the inventory yields the message "Go up and pay for it... or not." Plus, attempting to do so places you in a ridiculously long queue filled with people custom-designed to irritate the player with their words and behaviour. That, and the shop owner is clearly a terrorist.
• Shotguns Are Just Better:
  • The standard shotgun isn't actually flat-out better in terms of raw damage output versus the M16 "Machine Gun" or MP5 Submachine Gun, but it can pop heads at point-blank range, making it one of the few ways to deal with Mad Cow Tourettes Zombies without the sledgehammer.
  • The Sawed-Off Shotgun, on the other hand, has enough damage output per shot that it's actually viable at medium range even with the greater spread when you only need one or two pellets to kill the typical mook, and at short range, it's one of the few weapons that can outright reduce even armored enemies like soldiers and Survivalists to Ludicrous Gibs in an instant. Combine those qualities with plentiful ammo, and it's not just better, but a flat-out Game-Breaker. The other two shotguns have their own good points as well, the Lever-Action Shotgun trading off some fire rate for better spread than the base shotgun and the hidden Beta Shotgun being basically a flat upgrade, requiring reloading every six shells in return for greater power than the normal one (not at the ludicrous levels of the sawed-off, but still really good).
• Shout-Out:
  • In the Steam version of Postal 2, you can find the grave of a "Badge Collector". ^note This is based on Steam's then-new community gimmick of using trading cards (dropped from playing games or buying the cards themselves) to craft badges to display on your profile. Postal 2, of course, is one of the games to features cards and badges.
  • The new achievements, added to the game with the 2013 Update, contain several, including a reference to Steam Greenlight.^note The Greenlight trailer featured the Dude who was going around town asking for petitions for the game to be Greenlit. The achievement is gained by killing someone who refuses to sign the petition
  • A female NPC will shout "Attica! Attica!" if she witnesses a police officer attacking citizens.
  • One of the Dude's possible comments when getting high off of catnip is "whoa, in-a-gadda-da-vida, baby!"
  • One of the bosses of Paradise Lost, Two-Ears, is a reference to Borderlands, complete with his "level" next to his health bar and an intro screen. Likewise, the robotic wheeled Vend-A-Cure robots are Claptrap expires with a urinal built in.
  • A house in Paradise Lost has a room displaying the boxes of various games the dev team worked on - not just various Postal series boxes, but the more family-friendly games they worked on in the past for franchises such as Spy VS Spy, Daffy Duck and Wishbone. It's not a complete collection, though, as some of their older console titles are missing, as is Postal III.
  • When drinking "Habib's Power Station" soda to go Guns Akimbo, the Dude might announce it with "yeah, one in each hand!".
  • There's a hidden room in the Creature Control Center and Pets complex housing velociraptors in cages. Go in and kill them, and the Dude will comment "clever girl". You can also find a secret weapon, a SPAS-12 (heavily featured in the film in question) for doing it.
  • Paradise Lost in general is essentially what would happen if the original game were painted to resemble Fallout. In particular are the Cole Men you work for on Thursday, who dress themselves in blue-and-yellow suits that resemble the vault suits from Fallout, and the "Serial Killer on Steroids" rating you can get at the end of the game is now "Serial Killer on Buffout", referencing one of the fictional drugs the player can take in Fallout.
  • The part in the original game on Wednesday where the Dude gets kidnapped by rednecks and dressed up in a gimp suit is similar to a scene from Pulp Fiction, complete with the rednecks asking each other what day it is before the Dude wakes up and gives them more than what they bargained for.
  • When the Vend-A-Cure XJ-2s go berserk, one of the scientists tries shutting them down by quoting Klaatu Barada Nikto at them. Doubling as a shout-out to Army of Darkness as well, he's forgotten the last part and utters "klaatu barada something" instead.
  • The overdue book that The Dude has to return to the library on The Bitch's behalf is titled "Catch Her in the Rye". If you say the title quickly, it'd actually sound like "Catcher in the Rye".
  • Some NPCs will mockingly call you a "big man with a gun" if you pull out a gun in front of them.
  • Postal Dude will sometimes call himself "the lizard king" when he smokes catnip.
  • As part of the Black Comedy, upon killing an NPC, Postal Dude will occasionally say "Today is the first day of the end of your life.", a modified version of the phrase "Today is the first day of the rest of your lives." The phrase is frequently attributed to Charles Dederich Sr. who founded the infamous Synanon addiction recovery group that turned into a violent cult. (Portuguese singer Sergio Godinho was the one who inspired Charles to use the same phrase for his group.) As it turns out, Postal Dude has an uncle who is running a Waco-style cult at a rural compound.
  • In Paradise Lost, the demonic incarnation of the Bitch will ocassionally call the Dude a "pathetic creature of meat and bone."
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: At the end of Paradise Lost the Dude stops the Bitch mid-lecture by throwing his spare I.E.D into her mouth and blowing her to pieces.
• Sinister Scythe: Added in Apocalypse Weekend. The Dude can use it to sever enemies clean in two, whether swung up close or thrown from afar.
• Skewed Priorities:
  • Some of the women's reactions to the Dude pissing on them.
  "You did not just ruin my shirt!"
  "You ruined my make-up!"
  • The cops will refuse to arrest the Dude as long as his pants are unzipped, and will always focus on repeatedly telling him to zip them up instead of on, say, the fact that the Dude was just shooting everything up with a rocket launcher a few seconds before.
• Slap-on-the-Wrist Nuke: At the end of Apocalypse Weekend, you blow up Paradise with a nuke. You then come back to the city during the Paradise Lost DLC. You'd think nuking the place would leave it leveled to the ground, but instead, aside from the dirty-looking textures and some occasional broken window or wall, almost all of the buildings still stand with nary a scratch.
• Split Personality: The Dude from Postal III becomes this in Paradise Lost, becoming a separate entity on Friday. Although certain dialogue implies that he's been around since Postal 1.
• Strawman Political: The protesters, who are often hypocrites and are not above killing people and setting buildings ablaze to make their point... even if their point is against violence. Especially blatant when the first group you meet, Parents for Decency, wants to kill violent video gamers. They inevitably end up wanting to kill The Postal Dude, who mostly just ends up being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: The "Humanity Against Animal Testing" group, which is an overzealous Animal Wrongs Group, is similar to that of the "Ladies Against Manhandling Ecology" protesters in Apocalypse Weekend, and members of both groups are even subject to a gag regarding an elephant.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: There's a Bates Hotel in the base game that claims to have private rooms and relaxing murder-free showers. ^note Amusingly enough, the building doesn't even HAVE showers in it.
• Take That!:
  • Postal 2 features some stabs at Senator Joe Lieberman, who said some rather bad things about Postal 1, amongst other violent video games such as Doom.
  • The easiest difficulty in the game is called "Liebermode", and removes guns from the game entirely.
  • The Apocalypse Weekend expansion has the destruction of Bullfish Interactive, a parody take on Whiptail Interactive. A case of Real Life Writes the Plot, as RWS terminated their contract with Whiptail after the latter was found out to have committed multiple breaches of contract.
  • In the December 2013 patch for the Steam version, you can get an achievement by finding and pissing on a copy of Postal III. Another achievement is named "It's OK, we got Greenlit anyway" (for getting someone to refuse to sign your petition and then killing them), referencing the hate the game received for supposedly "stealing" other games' chances of getting released through Steam Greenlight due to its infamy basically guaranteeing it would be greenlit.
  • Paradise Lost introduces PU Games, which touts things like day one patches, preorder-exclusive DLC, and preorder-exclusive day one patch DLC as a symbol of pride. An obvious stab at EA and their infamous business practices. The Dude is sent to trash their office to put them out of business by order of Vince Desi. However, due to the parody posters for Psychonauts and Spacebase DF-9 found in the building, it's also taking the piss towards Double Fine and Tim Schafer over the now infamous schedule slippage of Broken Age and the outright abandonment of the aforementioned Spacebase DF-9. You even get to kill the "nameless" PU Games CEO, who is modeled to resemble Tim Schafer. Surprisingly, the lead developer of Paradise Lost has denied that the CEO was modeled after Tim Schafer, despite looking exactly like him.
  • The Equality Simulator◊ is a jab at the social justice warrior.
  • Paradise Lost for the most part treats Postal III this way, officially ignoring the events of the game and depicting the game as a whole as just a bad dream the Dude had during an eleven-year coma immediately after Apocalypse Weekend.
  • For April Fools Day Postal 2 has "DLC" which are jabs one after another, such as making you pay for useless armor for Champ as a jab to the infamous "horse armor" in Oblivion, RWS boxes as a jab at Team Fortress 2's own Mann Co. Crates (and loot boxes in general), one to themselves with their Super Fun Pigeon Hunter "cut" mission from Apocalypse Weekend (asking for the price of a full game to cover the costs of the five bucks they needed to scrape the mission together), and one to the player, whose every attempt at "buying" any of these has the Postal Dude mocking them for being so stupid with their money.
  • In Paradise Lost, there's a poster outside the arcade for a game called Xtreme Loathing that displays a long-haired man in a trench coat with a knife, and the tagline reads, "Humanity will feel his edge". This is a pretty clear jab at the series' Spiritual Licensee, Hatred. Ironically, RWS would later do a collaboration with Destructive Creations. Possibly doubles as Self-Deprecation.
  • Paradise Lost's Yeeland, the owner of Yeeland's Funland, which is a front for a gun trafficking operation, is a spoof of State Senator Leland Yee, who used video games as a scapegoat for violence, only to later be convicted of multiple crimes, one of which included gun trafficking.
  • The voting ballot you use on Wednesday is modeled after the butterfly ballot◊ that was used in Palm Beach County, Florida in the 2000 US presidential election which was widely criticised for its confusing poorly-designed layout that led to many voters to vote for the wrong candidate and said to have cost Al Gore the presidency.
    Postal Dude: "What fucking moron designed this?"
• 13 Is Unlucky: The game initially had 13 difficulty settings, with the thirteenth setting (the hardest) aptly named "They Hate Me." On this mode, everybody is armed to the teeth and out for your head, making it next to, if outright, impossible to do a Pacifist Run.
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works:
  • Can be done with the Secondary Fire of Apocalypse Weekend's melee weapons, though in the case of the machete, it will return to you after a while. Subverted if an armed character sees it coming and blocks the thrown weapon with his/her own weapon.
  • Also subvert-able in that throwing a sledgehammer at a cow from behind can actually cause the thing to get stuck up its anus. Dogs can also catch thrown melee weapons in their mouths as well.
  • Subverted yet again if an enemy with enough health manages to survive being impaled with a thrown katana, although the katana in question was only included by default with old versions of A Week in Paradise prior to the current Steam release, for which it must be reinstated with a M@D Weapons mod pack and played in Custom Game mode.
• Toilet Humor: Along with pissing on everything and everyone in game and making them vomit from being excessively brutal or having a venereal disease, Paradise Lost has this pleasant scene: After an Animal Wrongs Group member releases an elephant from its cage in the Mall's Animal Control Center, it "thanks" her by taking a huge dump on her, burying her in a mountain of shit and then attacking the other members of that group when you get back to it from another way.
• Undressing the Unconscious: : If the player is knocked out and kidnapped, the Postal Due wakes up in a brewery dressed in an assless Gimp suit. After escaping and getting your weapons back, you then have to go to the laundromat to change back to your regular clothes.
• Unexplained Recovery: Gary Coleman and Mad Cow Mike J reappear in Paradise Lost, completely healthy. During the course of Paradise Lost, Gary Coleman gets sent into the bottomless pit in his midget mine, Zack Ward gets killed so you can loot his vault to pay for Mike J's wedding, and Vince Desi gets turned into a Mad Cow Tourettes Zombie. All three get better for their respective bonus boss fights, should you meet with the faction leaders on Friday instead of just leaving town.
• Urine Trouble:
  • Piss is your default weapon. While it doesn't do any damage, there's no ammo limit for it, and you can Squick out people by urinating on them until they vomit. Even better, if you get in trouble with the law, you can toss doughnuts at them to temporarily halt their progress of arresting/killing you and then pissing on the food while they pick it up. Watch gleefully as the cop takes the now contaminated doughnut and eats it, only for him/her to regurgitate it out of his/her mouth and feel disgusted.
  • The Dude even has certain comments if you piss on something, especially on a corpse.
  • You can eat doughnuts after you've pissed on them. Normally, eating doughnuts has the Dude comment on their taste and regain 3 hit points, but eating these causes him to sputter in disgust and only regain one hit point.
  • Exaggerated with Enhanced mode for beating the game; in the original versions, among its other changes was that piss was replaced with a regenerating supply of napalm, which went well with you being fireproof. The Steam version updated this further, where you can now cycle between normal piss, blood, gonorrhea, vomit, and gasoline alongside the old napalm. Blood doesn't do anything special but it is worth a quick chuckle. So you can piss vomit into somebody's mouth, watch them puke, piss naplam to light them on fire, piss gas around to light more people on fire, and then piss blood on them to put them out.
• Unorthodox Reload: In the Steam Version there's the Beta Shotgun, one of the small handful of guns with an actual reloading animation. The Dude does this by grabbing a handful of shells and tossing it at the gun, all but one flying off.
• The Voice: The Dude's Wife (AKA: "The Bitch") is heard at the start and end of each of the five days, but she's never actually seen. ...that is, until Paradise Lost, where she serves as a boss on Wednesday, coming at the Dude with a large katana. Then serving as the (technically) Final Boss.
• Voice of the Legion: Most demonic enemies will have this, notably Mad Cow Mike J and the giant Bitch in Paradise Lost.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Averted when trying for the Pacifist Run: You must kill nothing. Not cats, not dogs, not cows, not elephants, not robots, not even zombies. This means you can't do a pacifist run in Apocalypse Weekend, as you are required to kill a certain number of zombies, cows and elephants at certain points.
• Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: The Postal Dude's name really is "The Postal Dude". Pay a parking ticket in the second game and the cop says, "And let that be a lesson to you, Mr. The Dude", and when he goes to collect a package later on he tells the clerk "last name's 'Dude'." His dad's gravestone is also labeled "T. Dude Sr."
• Wide-Open Sandbox: At the start of the day, you're given three or four errands and then left to your own devices. You can even choose to do some errands in different ways - for example, the bank robbery mentioned at the very top of the page? You can sneak into the vault and steal the money yourself while the intended robbers and police are fighting each other, and then sneak out through a secret passage behind a bookshelf. More areas unlock as the week progresses, and you can usually explore between them at will, though doing so on the final day becomes dangerous what with hellfire raining from the sky, and all.
• You Got Murder: The package intended for you later in the main game is a letter bomb. You can later find the exact same packages among the Taliban, most notably in Apocalypse Weekend.
• Your Head Asplode: A shotgun blast or sledgehammer whack to the face usually does this. Required to kill the zombies in Apocalypse Weekend.
• Zerg Rush: The gunfights generally boil down to this, due to enemies not being particularly smart. Taken to its logical extreme in Paradise Lost where barging into Yeeland's office will result in having to fight over several dozens of guards simultaneously in a tiny confined space.

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I regret nothing.

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