Review: Brazilian Drug Dealer Before 4

One of the quirkier games I’ve played in the last year was the outlandishly named Brazilian Drug Dealer 3: I Opened a Portal to Hell in the Favela Trying to Revive Mit Aia I Need to Close It. Released in September of 2025, it came onto my radar thanks to one of Civvie 11’s videos. I got in touch with the developer on Bluesky and asked if I could have a code for it. While I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do a video review considering it was roughly six months after release, I pledged to figure out some way to provide coverage for it in the future. While that came in the form of including it in an article that has yet to go live, I found an even better opportunity for talking about the game on this channel.

Brazilian developer Joeveno decided to create a semi-sequel/standalone expansion in the form of 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. If you were looking at the title of this video and wondering why it’s so long, you should understand by now. More importantly, that long-winded, almost joke name plays into the overall aesthetic of what Brazilian Drug Dealer (as I’ll be referring to it from now on) is about. Both games were created as a tribute and homage to an era of Brazilian bootleg games that permeated the South American market around the late 90s and early 00s. To the point, they are tributes to fan-made Quake levels.

That was what struck me when I saw Civvie play it: Quake through a Brazilian filter is not something I even knew existed. While video games from Japan and the United States often find their way into foreign markets, I didn’t think a game as decidedly “PC” as Quake would have a home in South America. Consoles were ludicrously expensive for multiple generations, let alone personal computers. Did Brazilian players even have the chance to play Quake when it was brand-new in 1996? It was released on the Zeebo around 2009, if you can believe it, so I suppose it was formative for a specific generation of Brazilian children.

Anyway, this sort-of review is about both Brazilian Drug Dealer 3 and Before 4, which are essentially the same game with some different levels and guns. All the footage is from the expansion, though my thoughts cover how I feel about both games.

Brazilian Drug Dealer Before 4 (PC)
Developer: Joeveno
Publisher: Joeveno, NoQuarter
Release Date: September 16, 2026
MSRP: $4.99

All the plot you need to know about either Brazilian Drug Dealer game is summed up by its subtitle. Your character opens a portal to hell in the favela while trying to revive Mit Aia, a fictionalized version of popular Brazilian singer Tim Maia. Since you can’t have demons running around Brazil, you obviously need to put an end to their invasion and save the country. Thus, you embark on a roughly two-hour quest to close the portal and rid São Paulo of hellspawn. In the expansion, you’re tasked with killing the remaining demons in the favela while also saving Mamadas from Ronaldo. Mamadas is potentially a reference to comedy rock band Mamonas Assassins while Ronaldo is very clearly a caricature of Ronald McDonald, right down to his character model being a warped depiction of the corporate mascot. Who said these games were hard to figure out?

What makes both of them so unique is their overall aesthetics and vibe. At a first glance, you might think these games are a gigantic shitpost, but that’s only maybe 10% true. Similar to Cruelty Squad, the presentation is deliberately off-putting to suck you into a specific mindset before you even start. Brazilian Drug Dealer is an audio/visual assault because a lot of Brazilian bootlegs were just like that. Loud, abrasive, and full of trademark infringing nonsense, the Brazilian video game market was skirting around copyright laws to deliver facsimiles of popular games to an audience that wasn’t getting them legitimately. Times have changed for the better, but to countless kids of the 00s, games like Super Contra 7, Grand Theft Auto Kurdi, and The Varginha Incident were as formative as Super Mario Bros. was to NES kids.

Putting that into context, it should help you understand what you’re looking at. Built on the Quake Engine, Brazilian Drug Dealer is basically a modified version of id Software’s classic shooter. Every gun is a replacement for something you can find in Quake and most of the enemies follow that same blueprint. If you know Quake, you’ll already have an understanding of how to play either Brazilian Drug Dealer. For 3, it can sometimes feel a little derivative, but the specifically low-fi style and deliberately abstract level design create a blisteringly fast campaign that is a blast to plow through in a single sitting. Since I don’t want to focus too much on that prior outing, I’ll simply say that I enjoyed its distinctive cultural styling more than its gameplay feel, though I’m always happy to play more Quake.

Before 4, however, feels like the developers in high gear. It still mostly follows the Quake formula, but it has been injected with a dash of Doom Eternal and its game design is greatly expanded for it. New to this semi-sequel is a double jump and midair dashing. On the surface, that shouldn’t matter, but it winds up resulting in levels with bigger play spaces, much denser enemy placement, and designs that were never possible in the original Quake. The in-game explanation is hilarious too, with a tutorial pop-up telling you that your character has shoved fireworks up their ass. Surprisingly, the double jump feels exactly like that, too.

Where 3 had to be somewhat restrained by the limitations of Quake, Before 4 goes all out. One great example is a level where you’re jumping between oversized cars and trucks, which feels closer to something on the Build Engine. Another starts with you entering a courtyard where the enemy numbers are just ridiculous, easily dwarfing entire episodes of Quake. The most memorable is this skateboarding segment, which... well, my video review shows it off in all of its glory. I appreciate the reference to Quake Rally.

The weapons steal the show, however. Again, they function nearly identically to Quake’s arsenal, but Quake doesn’t let you dual wield orange soda bottles or handle a payphone that shoots coconuts. Before 4 remodels everything so that weapons look unique from 3, but all the staples are here. The shotguns are maybe the most basic replacements, but the super nail gun becoming some mechanical monstrosity and the rocket launcher being a simple tube shooting mortars is great. I like the new bean bowl weapon that slingshots refried beans, and the CHIMARRÃO flamethrower is the type of bonkers I appreciate. It’s all so charismatic and wacky that you can’t help but fall in love, even if this is merely a reskin of a classic game.

The main campaign sports 18 levels, of which you can likely beat in roughly 90 minutes. It’s a little shorter than 3, but I feel Before 4 makes better use of gimmicks and one-off concepts. Coupled with larger enemy numbers, it feels like a more thought-out challenge for veteran FPS fans. I do think the extremely plentiful ammo eventually erodes any sense of difficulty as I was maining rocket launcher by the end. I thought the inclusion of a horde mode was new, but that debuted in 3 a few months ago alongside Steamworks integration as Joeveno is still updating that game. That plan will follow with Before 4, which is set to receive monthly content updates for a short period.

There is one big addition here that I thought should have been in 3: online multiplayer. There was no way for me to test this ahead of launch, but the Steam store page claims 255 players can co-op and deathmatch together on every level. Considering Quake’s deathmatch is still unparalleled in the online space, seeing it get a new lease on life through Brazilian Drug Dealer is incredible. I also think having 255 players would be truly ridiculous, but then maximalism is really the order of the day with this game.

Overall, I can’t find much to fault with either Brazilian Drug Dealer game. What makes them stand out might be purely down to aesthetics, but it’s not like Joeveno focused solely on visual language. These are legitimately solid shooters that take the best aspects of old-school design and inject it with a touch of cultural specificity. Brazilian Drug Dealer Before 4 is probably the safer bet thanks to its multiplayer component, but if you’re looking for an oft-kilter new game to play, either one will fit the bill.