REVIEW – Ebola Village doesn’t bother hiding what it’s chasing: old-school Resident Evil energy, right down to the vibe and the habits. At ten bucks you’re not buying a miracle – you’re buying a short, occasionally charming, frequently clumsy little horror trip. And yet it has a stubborn pulse: it can hook you for a few hours, even if it sometimes feels like you’re wrestling the game as much as the zombies.

A few weeks back I wrote about PlayStation giving extra oxygen to a game people were already calling a Resident Evil knockoff – Ebola Village. Now that I’ve spent a proper chunk of time with it, and with the console version landing on January 23 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox, my starting point hasn’t changed: it’s still a clone cooking with extremely familiar ingredients. What did change is the aftertaste – it can be surprisingly crafty about first impressions, and not always in a bad way.

I went in with my expectations intentionally buried. The cover, the trailers, the way it keeps echoing Resident Evil at nearly every turn – all of it screamed that this would be nothing more than a one-night joke. Then I actually played it. And when you remember this was essentially stitched together by one person, it becomes hard to dismiss outright. It’s rough, sure – but not nearly as indefensible as it looks from the outside.

So, is it worth ten dollars? On Steam it was hovering around nine bucks at the time of writing, and what you get for that is a few hours of zombie cleanup, key hunting, and light puzzle work. The execution is raw and rattle-prone, but there’s a retro pull to it that’s hard to fully deny – especially if you grew up on ’90s survival horror.

I received a review code for the PlayStation 5 version, which was perfect timing because the game had already been poking at my curiosity – mostly in a “how bad can it be?” kind of way. And yes, I was wrong. Mostly.

Ebola Village opens inside a grimy apartment block, with Maria as your lead. At first she reads as tough and capable, the kind of protagonist who can handle herself. Then there’s a costume change and she’s suddenly wearing the smallest, tightest shorts imaginable – a choice that undercuts the character in a way the game doesn’t seem to notice. We’ll file that under “another conversation.”

Same old survival horror grammar, spoken with a new accent

An Ebola-linked zombie outbreak is sweeping the country, and Maria heads for a small village where her mother and ex-husband live – hence the title. When she arrives, the situation snaps into place fast: the car’s out of fuel, the village is crawling with bloodthirsty infected, and the rest is classic survival-horror routine – locked doors, missing keys, simple riddles, stashed items, and that mandatory loop of circling back until the next step finally clicks.

The Resident Evil parallels hit you immediately. The menu layout, the way you manage your item stash, the logic of healing, the pace of combat – even some of the typography feels calibrated to trigger old memories. And yes, the old-school creaky-door-in-the-dark transition shows up when you move between areas – the kind that makes you grin from nostalgia and sigh because you know exactly what it’s leaning on.

In hindsight, it plays more like a salute than a straight-up copy, and in this price bracket that’s an acceptable stance. It isn’t pretending to reinvent anything. It’s pulling out a proven recipe and trying to cook it again with fewer ingredients.

Here’s the pleasant surprise: on-screen, it can look genuinely fine. Performance is mostly acceptable, even if you can tell you’re dealing with a coarse console conversion, and the zombie models don’t look disastrous across the board. The most morbidly entertaining part is what happens when you start tearing them apart – guns and knives both work, and you can reduce bodies to bones and scraps. Every so often the bodies collapse with a puppet-like physics flop that’s so over-the-top it momentarily breaks the mood – in a way that’s weirdly fun.

It’s often stiff, sometimes outright clumsy, but there’s an odd momentum to it that keeps pushing you forward, even when you can feel how much smoother this could have been with a bit more polish.

On a controller, aiming is the real boss fight

The hardest thing to swallow on consoles is that the combat clearly thinks in keyboard-and-mouse. When you aim, you get strange acceleration and sudden tugs, so dealing with a group can turn into a small nightmare if you’re trying to be precise. It’s manageable, but it isn’t graceful – and sometimes it doesn’t feel particularly fair, either.

Content-wise you’re looking at roughly three to five hours. There’s a trophy for finishing in under three hours, and the way the trophy list is structured nudges you toward multiple runs – roughly four if you want to clean everything up. Along the way you’ll find minor collectibles, basic puzzles, and you’ll have to juggle a limited inventory – exactly the kind of small, practical pressure old Resident Evil loved.

It also says a lot that the PC version hit Steam back on May 13, 2025, and the console release arrived later on January 23, 2026. This isn’t a fresh, era-defining title trying to kick the door down – it’s a late, low-budget survival horror looking for a second audience. The store descriptions lean hard into that imported ’90s mood, the rural dread, and the nastier violence, while the game itself doesn’t bother hiding its bare-bones solutions.

For ten dollars, it delivers exactly what it promises – and that’s rarer than it should be

It’s extremely straightforward, but when you factor in that the developer is literally called Indie Games Studio (yes, really), and the game kept me occupied for about four hours without driving me up the wall, I’d say it’s worth the ten. Not because it’s “good,” but because it’s functional on its own terms.

The whole game is in Russian, and the English translation often feels like it was assembled on autopilot. Still, it’s entertaining, and in the end that’s the point. I don’t particularly care that the voice work is cheap and fractured, or that the plot is predictable. What’s more impressive is that one person managed to ship something this playable – and that this is already the fourth entry in a series that’s been around for roughly six years.

On the console side, the publisher listings name Axyos Games Entertainment LLC, and the PlayStation Store description frames it as a first-person adventure: Maria heads to the village to reach her mother and ex-husband, Ruslan, after a TV broadcast interrupts everyday life with news of a biological threat. The default audio being Russian gives the whole thing a raw sense of place – and it also makes the rougher edges of the subtitles harder to ignore.

It has heart – just don’t ask it to beat smoothly

Ebola Village has the soul of a low-budget project that can barely keep a steady rhythm – but it’s still a soul. I like that a solo developer has spent years stubbornly building these throwbacks to ’90s horror design, and what you get for ten dollars is far from the worst deal in the world. I’ve paid more for less, easily. It won’t win awards, but for a few hours of brain-off zombie wandering with a retro bite, it gave me exactly what I was looking for.

Ebola Village is available on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5. We reviewed it on XSX thanks to the publisher.

-Herpai Gergely „BadSector”-

Publisher: Axyos Games Entertainment LLC (console), indie_games_studio (PC)
Developer: Indie Games Studio (Steam: indie_games_studio)
Genre: survival horror (horror action-adventure), first-person focus
Release: PC – May 13, 2025 (Steam); consoles – January 23, 2026 (PS4/PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S)