The Postal games have always been what you might call “slop.” Running With Scissors’ series of puerile, drearily unfunny action games have somehow regularly been released since 1997, relying entirely on their hamfisted “shock factor” to try to impress an audience that delights in “politically incorrect” or “anti-woke” dross, without also remembering the important elements of “fun.” But the most recently revealed entry in the 30-year series, Postal: Bullet Paradise, earns the “slop” mantle for a different reason, after massive backlash against its prolific use of AI has seen it canceled in the same week it was announced!
Revealed just two days ago, on December 3, Postal: Bullet Paradise was due to be a Vampire Survivors-like spin-off from the franchise, developed by a separate team called Goonswarm Games. Described as a “bullet-heaven shooter with online co-op,” Running With Scissors promoted the upcoming game with a Steam page, YouTube trailers, and a section on its own website. Of them all, the only thing that fully remains two days later is the post, with the Steam page delisted and the game removed from RWS’s and Goonswarm’s pages.
Based on the game’s cancellation announcement on Running With Scissors’ X page, it seems potential fans launched a sizable backlash after noticing Postal: Bullet Paradise allegedly contained AI-generated material. Users on the franchise’s Reddit were complaining about AI art appearing in the trailer, and alleging Goonswarm had used AI in its previous work. “You see can very clearly that all the pixel sprites are ai generated,” claimed on Reddit poster, adding, “It just sucks that rws is going down the path of ai since they’ve been so supportive of art for a long time.”
Then came the announcement declaring the entire project flushed. “After revealing POSTAL: Bullet Paradise, a title Running With Scissors was planning on publishing but not developing,” says the statement, “we’ve been overwhelmed with negative responses from our concerned POSTAL Community. The strong feedback from them is that elements of the game are very likely AI-generated and thus has caused extreme damage to our brand and our company reputation.”
After revealing POSTAL: Bullet Paradise, a title Running With Scissors was planning on publishing but not developing, we’ve been overwhelmed with negative responses from our concerned POSTAL Community. The strong feedback from them is that elements of the game are very likely…
— Running With Scissors (@RWSstudios) December 4, 2025
The statement goes on to express RWS’s desire to be transparent before stating that Bullet Paradise has been canceled, effective immediately. “Our trust in the development team is broken,” it reads, “therefore we’ve killed the project.”
This is especially embarrassing for the publisher, given that it had only a few days ago publicly disagreed with Epic’s Tim Sweeney over the need to declare AI use in game development.
Customers deserve to know if a game was crafted with creativity, soul and actual talent rather than some machine that craps out anything from a prompt.
We don’t know what the future holds, but AI apologists like Mr. Sweeney are making this shit unbearable already. https://t.co/eHszQu5STP
— Running With Scissors (@RWSstudios) November 27, 2025
The original Postal, a top-down shooter about playing a postal worker who goes on a mass murder spree throughout the town of Paradise, Arizona, went out of its way to court controversy and notoriety when it first appeared. Its final level was set in an elementary school (albeit where the main character, Postal Dude, has a complete breakdown after none of his weapons work on the children), and its deliberately crass approach was designed to get as much negative attention as possible, presumably to drive sales. However, the mediocre game never sold all that well, and after an equally crap 3D sequel five years later, the company began outsourcing development to Russian studios. 2011’s Postal III was made by Trashmasters, and was so terrible RWS apologized for the game in the aftermath, eventually deleting it from their store entirely. A 2016 redux version of Postal 2 sold so poorly on PC that console versions were canceled (until years later), until RWS finally returned to making their own game with 2022’s Postal 4: No Regrets.
It’s probably not a good thing when your franchise’s highlight is a Uwe Boll movie. And to be clear, that too was atrocious.
