In Ebola Village, we visit a village where something has gone horribly wrong. The villagers are now murderous, bloodthirsty lunatics who attack everyone they see. We are now going to try to find out what has happened and solve the mystery, which soon proves to be easier said than done.

On imitation and influences

Charles Caleb Colton coined the famous expression “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” sometime during the early 19th century, and Pablo Picasso (or T.S. Eliot) expressed the matter as “Good artists borrow, great artists steal”. But this can be taken to extremes, which happened in Ebola Village.

First impressions

When I started up the game, I was immediately surprised by two things. Firstly, the game was entirely in Russian. There is no English voice acting, but there are English subtitles, thank goodness. Secondly, there is an option to watch a film about what happened before the game starts, and when you click on it, the film doesn’t play within the game; instead, you are taken to YouTube to watch it there. I can imagine that doesn’t feel so strange if you’re playing on PC, but I was testing the game on Xbox Series X and it felt very strange to be taken completely out of the game.

I have placed that short film at the bottom of this review, and strangely enough, the film is in English with horrible dubbing. So now it’s time to start playing. I start the game and am met by our female avatar lying with her legs wide apart, wearing only a bra and panties. She is watching the news, and next to the TV stands a giant jar of pickled cucumbers (!?). The intro drones on and on, and I felt a bit stressed and wanted to get started with the game, so I skip the intro.

The strange start

We are now in first-person view and can move around the apartment. I pick up a ring, read her diary, which is apparently typewritten on a single A4 sheet, and I find her clothes in the closet. I can’t pick up the clothes; every time I click on them, the game just proclaims “Your Clothes”. So I walk around the apartment, into the kitchen and find a notebook, and out onto the balcony and back and forth. There is nothing to pick up and nothing happens.

I’m starting to get both frustrated and angry, so finally, I give in and check a walkthrough of the game and realize then that a cutscene is supposed to occur in the hallway. I go into the hallway, nothing happens. I replay the sequence, nothing happens. Then it occurs to me that I haven’t tried letting the entire intro play through, so I do that, and suddenly the cutscene appears and I can actually pick up my clothes.

Game logic and puzzles

Now you might think this is the only time the game behaves strangely, but I can tell you it’s only the beginning. For even if the environments and sound design are quite well-made, just about everything else is incredibly naive and sometimes laughably bad. For example, the first “puzzle” you are faced with is that you don’t dare go into your own bathroom because it’s too dark in there, but you have a flashlight on you! Even when you are more or less naked, you can turn on the flashlight. So to solve the problem of entering the bathroom, you have to go into a darkened, super-creepy apartment where you find a fuse so you can restore power to the bathroom. So why do you even need to go in there? Well, you must have your driver’s license so you can drive your car. Because the police have nothing better to do than check licenses during the apocalypse.

Combat and animations

It continues like this throughout the game. One stupid thing after another, and when you later start meeting enemies, it becomes even more laughable, as you’d be hard-pressed to find worse-animated characters. Possibly, I can give a plus point for how they get injured when you shoot them.

A shameless clone

For those of you who haven’t already figured it out, Ebola Village is a shameless clone of the Resident Evil games. In one scene, our main character changes clothes and puts on short shorts and a tank top, so they aren’t even trying to hide the similarities. The game creators have tried to make it their own by naming the game Ebola Village and thereby not mentioning zombies, but it’s clear that’s what the enemies are, as they try to bite you and behave like the undead. You pick up potted plants with herbs that you can combine into medicines. There is a black screen with a door opening when you move between different maps, and you save by finding phones. In short, most of it feels familiar.

Performance and optimization

Ebola Village has only one mode and the FPS stays between 30–60 throughout the game. In indoor environments, the FPS is higher because there are smaller levels to load. The environments still look okay, but it’s clear the game is poorly optimized, as when you enter a new area, we see how the various textures load in one by one. In short, it’s pretty miserable all the way through.

A one-man project

However, there are some extenuating circumstances, and that is when I saw the end credits after the rather short playtime of around two and a half hours and realized that it’s more or less just one guy who has made the whole game.

There are a few other names, and they are voice actors and composers, but otherwise, it’s only Victor Trokhin who seems to have done just about everything in the game. What’s a pity is that there are still some competent parts of the game that actually work, and it would have been more interesting to see him create something a bit more original than outright copying an existing game.

In summary, Ebola Village is far from a good game, but for those who have a bit of cash to spare and want to experience Resident Evil’s Russian cousin, this is the game for you. As mentioned, it’s impressive that such a small team made it, and the unintentional humor still makes it quite entertaining.

Axyos Games sent a review code for this test. The sender of the material has no editorial influence on our reviews.