Context is important to appreciate art. Without context, an impactful work has nothing to strike off of. How many people have discarded the most historically important books of all time due to a lack of understanding of the work’s cultural context? Idioms, turns of phrase, and even entire ways of life go extinct every day, and our understanding goes with them. The greater the distance between then and now, the higher the chance for misunderstanding or just plain incomprehension. The Dead Language Society did a fascinating examination of just this: a demonstration of how quickly language can shift in just one-hundred years. Even anecdotally, my understanding of American English has shifted drastically in the past ten years, and will likely shift even more before my time here is done.
This warping of context becomes even more apparent when you consider spatial difference. My life as a North American woman, living in American society, under this political regime, is completely different from a Pakistani man living in Karachi. I don’t understand his jokes; he does not understand mine. We’re both still people, alike in dignity, but there is a gap—he probably laughs much less at Youtube Poops and is a better person for it.
BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER BEFORE 4: DEMONS FROM THE PORTAL TO HELL I OPENED ARE STILL IN THE FAVELA AND NOW I HAVE TO SAVE MAMADAS FROM RONALDO is the video game equivalent to my prior opining. I, from moment one, was completely lost. The experience was not unlike entering a friend’s group chat only to find they possess an entire pantheonic religion worth of inside jokes. The ostracizing comradery becomes impossible to take part in without an archaeological dig of a Discord server.
Despite my background knowledge in shooters, BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER BEFORE 4: DEMONS FROM THE PORTAL TO HELL I OPENED ARE STILL IN THE FAVELA AND NOW I HAVE TO SAVE MAMADAS FROM RONALDO, in this, made me feel similarly.
JPEG Artifact Quicksand
Early this year, I talked about the value of inaccessible aesthetics. Something being “ugly” to your sensibilities does not make it valueless or the product of a broken mind. I still absolutely believe this to be true. However, this blade cuts both ways: no matter how open-minded you may be, there is always the risk of something absolutely missing your sensibilities.
Brazilian Drug Dealer 4 alienated me with relative immediacy. The audio-visual presentation was the equivalent of hearing a song so bass-boosted as to be auditorily illegible. The extremes sandblasted away subtlety to a degree which removed all sense of what was or wasn’t a joke. The health icons are emojis; enemies are incomprehensible cocktails of cultural references I have no way of reliably parsing; the view models employ vertex wobbling so sickening I was left questioning how it was even possible.
Brief as the game is, I was exhausted within minutes. Music pounds in your ears, looping in a way I can only describe as oppressive. Encounter bleeding into encounter. Gunfire only adds to the drone of pure, unadulterated noise.
When I thought I could endure no more, the game granted me the gift of relative silence. I took a deep breath, allowing relief to wash over my fried nervous system. The next room was open to me and a surprise was promised as I intruded. Within moments of entering the chamber, I was deafened by a cacophony of screaming so loud I had to remove my headphones entirely. Tinnitus now activated, I closed the game and began to reflect.
From that moment on, I was disengaged. Not out of spite but out of absolute incompatibility. The aesthetic overabundance washed right over me. The enemies which wielded the sonic weapon became a normal entry in the game’s roster—not getting any funnier with their repeat appearances.
Try as I might, I could not find the hook to pull me further in.
To Feel Something
Speaking only of the gameplay for a moment, this game is Quake. I don’t mean this hyperbolically: the game is constructed atop Id Tech 2. The movement is familiar to anyone who has bunny hopped or rocket jumped around a deathmatch map. You can double jump—because you are Brazilian—and you can dash—because you have fireworks up your ass. On a moment-to-moment basis the game is enjoyable to interface with because, again, it’s just Quake. I would be a hypocrite among hypocrites to say the game was unenjoyable when it borrows most prominently from the bedrock of the FPS genre.
Having said that, I continued to play the game in a state of absolute dissociation. Levels passed me by with no thoughts in my head. The weapons bleed into one another. Whenever something took more than five seconds to die, I scrolled the mouse wheel upward until a weapon of suitable killing capacity terminated the thought my brain was desperate to have. Ammunition was plentiful enough that any other tactical thoughts were rendered unnecessary. With lidocaine numbness, I passed through the game with naught but a single death even playing on the highest difficulties.
Even the levels evoke an uncomfortable thoughtlessness in me. Things resemble their real-life counterparts, but when the game told me where I was I often had to just say, “I’ll take your word for it.” Perhaps at a squint I could identify that I was in a football field, or an airport, but for the most part my eyes were unseeing, save for the area immediately encircling my crosshair.
Strange as it is, this itself forms its own sort of backhanded compliment: never once did I get lost. In fact, the level design is a maximalist endpoint of the stupid “yellow paint” argument everyone was addicted to for several months. It is difficult to get lost in this game because every surface has an arrow plastered on it; those arrows have arrows telling you exactly how you’re supposed to interact with the thing it’s pointing at. This made the navigation effortless even in my violent delirium.
After finishing my first playthrough, I felt grossly cynical. Try as I might, the only word which came to mind was “serviceable.” I pondered. I have played games far less mechanically satisfying than this and come away less negatively. Ultimately, it was research which gave me the perspective I have now.
Bode Expiatório
The cultural impact of this game has—in what was immediately accessible to me—achieved a similar sort of memetics which has disgusted me in the past. When I spoke of Cruelty Squad or Beyond Citadel, I took several paragraphs to speak on what I found repugnant about the response to both. Similarly, I think there is a comparable reaction here. There is not an extensive amount of critical reception for this game or its predecessor. In those that did exist, the most common throughline I could find was:
“I don’t get it but I’m glad they’re having fun up there.”
This obviously went hand in hand with the memetic response from less inhibited user reviews. This game is sitting at overwhelmingly positive on Steam but this reception is choked in irony. They talk about how it’s brainrot, how it’s absurd, how it’s “just like going to Brazil” but speaking with a type of flippant generality which made me a little nauseous.
The cultural obsession with irony is toxic at the best of times, especially when authenticity is difficult to find. Watching the developer speak openly about the passion they had for this game leads me to believe in the heart put into its creation. I don’t believe that this was just another thoughtless product slopped onto Steam in the hopes that it will make the dev some money.
What seemed at first to be a lazy attempt to make something absurdist was instead attempting to portray an unfamiliar experience. A love letter for the underground modding and bootleg scene of Brazil. It is here that I repeat what was said at the article’s onset. Context is everything for understanding where art is coming from. Incoherence may be a flaw, but often it’s just as likely that the internal schema the work is operating from is inapparent to the audience.
My prior words were something of an act—please forgive my deception. Those statements were reflective of the reactionary way people often engage with art. That which does not flatter you is bad, poorly thought out, the product of an ingenuine mind. I lied because without reflection it is easy for even a well-intentioned person to succumb to such a mindset. I, too, am not immune to it.
The Anglocentrism of art is a problem that many people fail to reckon with. The western world, and more specifically that of the Northern hemisphere, often operates with a pre-assertion that it is they alone who exist to determine what “relevance” is. Look at how people tantrum when they are forced to read a subtitle. Look at how people view the diverse medium of something like anime, seeing only a hotbed of pedophilia and degeneracy with nothing of any importance to say.
It is frightening to be an outsider; yet many people endure this every day. It is frequently othering to see only art which does not represent you. It would be boorish of me to expect all art to perfectly cater to my own personal understanding. Put bluntly, sometimes a work simply isn’t about you.
I don’t know what it means to be Brazilian. My grasp of Brazilian culture in many ways begins and ends with this game and some of the loose overlap my interests have, with things like movies and music (please listen to the album Celestial by the Brazilian band Papangu, thank you). If something like the 2025 despelote can talk about the incredibly specific experience of being Ecuadorian in the midst of a near religious fervor of a football game and be praised for it, I think even this game—as absurd as it is—has a place to exist as well. It isn’t just American nostalgia which has value.
A game like this can be made by a passionate dev, with a genuine heart, who says loudly, “I care about this, this is relevance, this is important,” even if some don’t have the context to appreciate it. Even after everything I said, I don’t “get” Brazilian Drug Dealer 4, but it’s not my place to. I don’t get it in the same way I don’t “get” the nostalgia for the Wii and Windows XP and other aesthetics that are just aesthetics to me. In much the same way that I don’t expect to gatecrash a friend group and demand to be accommodated, this simply isn’t a piece meant to flatter me. I am genuinely glad it exists though.
Rather than doing the tried-and-true method of declaring what numerical value this game has, I instead say: this is not a review. It is not my place to determine the value or quality of something not made for me. I wanted only to talk about this to give some perspective into a world that is not your own, and perhaps, maybe offer introspection on the things reactionarily cast aside or discredited. If this work in any way provokes a response from you, I encourage you to play it.
Go wherever your curiosity guides you.
