My Dear Brother Jeff follows Liu, a very studious and devoted son, who one day is told by his parents that he really has a brother, and that his name is… “Jeffrey Dahmer.” No relation to any persons living or dead, of course: this is a Jeff the Killer RPGMaker fangame, after all. Jeff goes to the hospital to try and meet his brother for the first time, a magical fire, channelled by the Star of David, allows for Jeffrey Dahmer’s escape, and for him to then later come home and try to kill Liu’s family. What follows is a perpetual chase: one where you have to solve poorly communicated item/key puzzles, where the geography of the area will often trap you in a corner or give you no actual way of dodging Jeff, and where sometimes if you save in the wrong place you’ll load to Jeff instantly killing you. Everything is so dark that it’s really hard to know where and what you can do: something that doesn’t stop even when the endless chase does. There’s this one section where you escape your house by going through a network of tunnels that Jeffrey Dahmer apparently dug under your house and it’s impossible to see anything and it's the worst. At least none of that is present for the game’s final act. And, to its… credit, maybe, the game has a decently evocative artstyle (for better or worse) and the writing at least here seems more like a bad translation job. As far as these Jeff the Killer games go, this probably at least has the most going for it. Which is a low bar, but still. I have to take the positives where I can here. 2/10.

Of note: before now, this game in English (and its original French) was lost media for a really good period of time, after the developer uploaded a 2.0 in Spanish, deleted the originals, and then promised versions in other languages that never came. Luckily, I happen to have a friend who’s very gifted at internet sleuthing, and with some luck he managed to bring both versions of the game back from the dead. Here (English) they (French) are, if you’re interested! I’d recommend you play it yourself, or, uh, watch one of the many YouTube playthroughs that went up circa 2014. It’s really the kind of thing you have to see with your own eyes.