It’s the start of the new year, and evil looms. The undead walk the streets, and you’re trapped in a European village in the latest game from a horror franchise. The door to nightmares has swung open. This is…Ebola Village.
You Never Truly Escape
Ebola Village stars Maria, who lives in the most evil of all apartment complexes, watching TV. She sees that a viral outbreak is spreading across the land, and she decides to solve several puzzles to find her car keys and driver’s license to go to the local village and save her mother and ex-husband.
It turns out the pharmaceutical company PANICUM has created some kind of bioweapon, and it’s taken over the village and beyond. Being the savvy survivor that she is, Maria decides to try to save her obviously infected mother by driving her to safety with the one tractor in said village.
To say the story (or lack thereof) in Ebola Village is wild would be an understatement. Rather than a narrative driven by plot and character development, we have a string of events such as: Maria finds out her ex-husband still loved her and chooses to lay in his bed for 2 seconds before standing back up and walking off; deciding that contracting hepatitis from the local drunk will give her immunity from the horde of the undead; and blaming herself fully for the incident while her family home sets on fire for no reason.
It’s an interesting take on gaming narratives, presenting the player with such bizarre scenarios that not only fail to further the story of the game but also fail to develop the characters in the game. It feels like a collection of skits put together by someone who’s seen a few horror films and has played the first hour of the original Resident Evil. Don’t worry, an hours all you need! We got this, boss!
The Next Same Thing
So, Ebola Village isn’t quite going to dethrone the great titles of indie horror like Chronos: The New Dawn, but drawing from “The classic era of survival horror” is surely going to win everyone over, even if the story isn’t the hottest thing around, right? And by “classic era of survival horror”, it means we are going to copy the formula of Resident Evil 8: Village because it’s about damn time Capcom got taken down a peg in the world of horror.
Ebola Village is a first-person survival horror, which, as I’ll bring up later, is very likely a good thing. It follows the usual ebb and flow of the genre, where you’ll be tackling the undead, finding and combining items, and solving puzzles to eventually save the day. Or, in this case, escape the local village on a tractor.
There isn’t a single aspect of the gameplay that hasn’t been done before and better. The controls for combat feel incredibly loose, and menu navigation and item combination are also quite clumsy. I found most of my healing items ended up being used accidentally, though I was playing on normal difficulty, so I fortunately didn’t really need them.
I would kick myself if I didn’t mention the health and damage in this game. The main zombies just grab you, throw you to the floor, and stomp on you, while werewolves just swipe. The knife ends up being fairly pointless outside of destroying boxes. If you happen to get hurt enough to need to heal, you can use “Nettles” or “Mint Plants” that totally aren’t the same as green or red herbs, wink wink.
What An Arsenal
The game has a whole three weapons: a handgun, a knife, and a shotgun. And really, that’s all you need. The handgun carries you through most of the game until you are forced to get the shotgun to progress, and even then, you only really need that to take on the evil zombie bull and the random werewolves that turn up towards the end of the game.
You’ll read badly translated files for hints to the puzzles in the game. There was one puzzle in the whole thing that I thought was quite clever. And then there was another that involved having to cross the village and find a shovel in order to dig up the main character’s dead cat because the code for the locker holding your ex-husband’s front door key was cleverly hidden on the collar. No, this isn’t a joke.
There are several points of the game where it’ll dramatically cut to a cutscene showing a unique enemy or character. This wouldn’t usually be an issue, but in Ebola Village, it turns out that those enemies and characters won’t even appear outside of that cutscene. The game has a whole 2 enemy types and 2 boss types: zombies and werewolves, chainsaw dude and zombie bull respectively. Heck, the final “boss” is just a sped-up version of the standard zombies with the power of being a bullet sponge.
My first and only run of the game clocked in at just short of 3 hours, which for the asking price, is about right. Apparently, I didn’t collect all of the “Amulets,” which was a shock to me as I hadn’t collected any. I had found several evil dancing dolls (referred to elsewhere as “Slavic amulet dolls”), so I am assuming these are another victim of localization issues, but considering the completion screen was also showing me a cosplayer of Jill Valentine from Resident Evil, the translation of collectables was one of the last questions I had at that point.
Ebola Village, from a gameplay perspective, is completely barren of originality, and what little fun it offers runs dry long before you’re trundling off on your tractor to take down PANICUM. I have zero idea how this ties into the other EBOLA titles by this developer, but after playing this one, I almost had a sick curiosity to play the others. almost.
Wish dot com Horror
Presentation in horror games is key to setting the right tone for your game, and Ebola Village nails it…if the idea was to produce a Temu-tier knockoff of Resident Evil 8: Village. It features what looks very much like a bunch of generic store-bought assets, wonky animations, and a mostly boring area to explore.
I do have to give the game its flowers when it comes to the big mansion section, which is the standout of the game and actually nails the horror theme. Same thing with the church, which sadly is only a very small section. There are slight glimpses of good when it comes to the game, but the rest is absolutely bogged down with puzzling and lazy choices.
One thing that really stuck out was generative AI usage for inventory item icons. I clearly picked up a key that looks like a club from a deck of playing cards, but the image in my inventory showed it as a green cross instead. This was initially baffling before I looked more into the game, and there was an announcement by the developer that generative AI had been used for certain aspects of the game, which may somewhat explain a lot more of the game in hindsight.
The music is droll and uninspired. The voice acting is suitably hammy and weird, which does lean into that classic survival horror style, but I’m not 100% that was the intent here. It just adds to this weird experiment that was Ebola Village.
Verdict
Sadly and not so shockingly, Ebola Village isn’t going to be the title that dethrones any of the kings of horror. And looking at it, did any of us really think it would be? There are flashes of good in the game, but for the most part, it just feels like a painfully phoned-in Resident Evil Village clone with a poor excuse for a story and some unintentionally shocking and funny things going on in the rather short run time. I knew I was in for a ride when the game gave me an option to watch a movie. I assumed it was the intro, so I chose to watch it, and the game just opened up my browser and started playing a bizarre live-action short film based on the game, which was oddly hosted on a Resident Evil fan channel on Youtube rather than implemented in the game itself.
Whatever strange puzzle-coded apartment you live in, I wouldn’t recommend you leave to venture out to Ebola Village, not even to save your family. Instead, save your money and pick up literally any other bigger-name horror game, and you’ll have a better and more cohesive time. Now, excuse me while I go get hepatitis and try to immunize myself from this series.
EBOLA VILLAGE IS NOT RECOMMENDED
If you would like to see more horror games, you may be interested in our review of Resident Evil 4 (Remake) or Tormented Souls.
Many thanks go to indie_games_studio for a PlayStation 5 review code for this title.
Pride of utopia & greatest thing ever, I found the One Piece, Collected the Dragon Balls & won the Mortal Kombat Tournament in one night, it was quiet for me that night! Follow me on Twitter @powahdunk
