I think that this may the first time I’ve reviewed a game that uses a real-world disease that killed millions, at least until somebody makes Covid Simulator (nobody make that game). Ebola Village comes from Axyos Games and Indie Games Studio (that’s the dev’s name, at least it’s accurate).

“EBOLA VILLAGE – this is a classic survival horror game from the 90s with a focus on atmosphere and player immersion. Solve puzzles, follow the story carefully and use various weapons in a brutal fight for survival. Danger lurks at every turn.”

As this is one of my quick reviews, allow me to cut to the chase. Ebola Village is very average. It’s not bad, it’s not good, it just sits there between the two. Taking cues and borrowing heavily from the Resident Evil franchise, Ebola Village tries to take you back to that ’90s survival horror boom. All the tropes are here, restrictive inventory slots, dated graphics, stiff animations, awkward controls, and you even get some awful voice acting (all in Russian with English subtitles). Granted, I don’t speak Russian, but even I can tell the voice acting here was phoned in.

To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure how much of the jank found here is intentional as an “homage” to those ’90s survival horror titles, or if the jank is because this is a low-budget game from an Indie team, could be a bit of both. The story is quite shallow and basic, and the game mechanics are simple and rough around the edges.  A few issues I had with this were, there’s no option to do a quick 180 turn. As this is first-person and as the infected can (and do) pop up behind you, it would help if you could tap a button and quickly turn. A lot of similar first-person games have this. The combat feels very “floaty” too and aiming your gun is quite inaccurate.

The map screen allows you to zoom in and out, but you can’t scroll the map, so you can’t see if there are any possible exits outside of your limited view (this tripped me up more than once as I missed a couple doors). Inventory management is made unnecessarily fiddly. As an example, I had some shotgun shells in my storage crate (so I didn’t have to carry them around, I found more shells and put them in the crate, but they didn’t stack. Instead, I had to take the ones from the crate and put them in my inventory, then I had to combine the two, then I could put them in the crate as one. This is just too damn awkward, especially as inventory is very limited, I had to remove an item I was carrying to pick up the stored shells, to combine them, to put them in the crate, to then put the item I removed back into my inventory.

Interacting with items can be annoying too. You get a button prompt appear whenever there is something you can pick up or use, but the hit box for this is very precise, a pixel off and you’re tapping your button and getting nowhere, even if the button prompt is showing. Also, if there are two items near each other, trying to pick the one you want to focus on is almost impossible. Finally, the button prompt to interact with items in other rooms show even if you can’t get to them. This is really frustrating as many times (given the awkwardness of the whole thing) I thought I was trying to pick up an item in front of me, but couldn’t because the prompt was for an item in another room.

Ebola Village “borrows” so much from the Resident Evil franchise that it even has the herbs for health mechanic, and yes, you can combine them. Some of the puzzles are taken straight from the RE games too. Overall, Ebola Village is a half-decent game. I can’t help but think it could be even better with a bit of polish though. It’s old-school survival horror that may lean a bit too much into “homage”, to a fault. If you’re a fan of the older era of survival horror than you’ll get a kick out of this, but the rough edges that the game has are quite annoying.