Ebola Village | PS5 Review

The trailer for Ebola Village arrived at the perfect moment. Resident Evil: Requiem is on its way but not quite here yet, and the other new games weren’t screaming for my attention. A clear RE-inspired game with a gritty environment and zombies out to attack and bite sounded like a great way to spend the weekend. I wasn’t blown away, and there were plenty of unmistakable “independent developer” moments, but I liked it enough to finish the game in two sittings. The only thing that pulled me away was my nephew’s birthday party.

A Family Reunion From Hell

Maria is newly divorced and living in a condemned apartment building. Imagine the filthy backrooms where the Russian mafia plan their deeds. Those resemble Maria’s apartment. Cigarette butts everywhere, empty food boxes, paint peeling, permanent stains. Seriously, it makes you wonder if Maria has any pride left at all.

Well, apparently she does! She sees on the news that there has been an Ebola breakout in California. Of course, that means there’s one in Russia, too. Maria’s family is in a village, so she better go save them. Her ex-husband is there, too. Maybe he knows something or can help. Let’s find our car keys and driver’s license (after finding a new fuse and getting the lights to turn on in Maria’s laundry room so that she can find them).

A quick drive to the village and Maria arrives at a death crime scene where the evidence markers and evidence itself are still sitting on the ground. From here, Maria begins looking around. The door to her mom’s house is locked, so Maria must find the key. And so begins the part-puzzler, part-survival horror game. Maria spends most of her time looking for items like keys, WD-40, bolt cutters, and other objects which will allow her to move along to the next scene. All in an effort to save her mom, rid the village of as many zombies as she can, survive, and escape.

Old-School Gated Scares

Ebola Village plays like a first-person shooter. When you are holding a weapon, there is an aiming reticle always available. Holding the LT button aims, but it also makes aiming and shooting more difficult. This was especially evident when using the shotgun as opposed to the pistol. The shotgun, when aiming, obscured so much of the screen that I could not actually see the zombies I was shooting at. The shotgun is definitely the preferred weapon, but I quickly stopped aiming with LT and relied on the standard reticle instead. If you run out of shells or find yourself in close quarters, there is a knife for melee combat, though I mostly used it as a last resort.

If I had one area of frustration, it would be how the game handles battle set pieces. Let’s say I’ve cleared a house of all enemies. I walk into a room and find the item for the objective. Once the cutscene of me finding the object is complete, we return to gameplay and there are one or more zombies in the room with me ready to attack. Where did they come from? It feels like a cheap way to force tension rather than earn it.

The village itself is an open area, though not enormous. The progression is gear-gated, meaning I couldn’t get into an area beyond a gate until I found the bolt cutters or a specific key. Pay attention to clues and documents; there are combination locks aplenty.

I really appreciated the familiar controls and mechanics of Ebola Village. Since it mimics the giants of the genre so closely, I didn’t have to spend time learning a new layout or wrestling with a steep learning curve. I was able to simply jump right in and start playing.

Gritty Sights and Subtitled Sounds

The graphics have a grainy PS3 or Xbox 360 era look. The characters are rendered in a similar manner. The default brightness setting is too dark; it’s meant to increase the fear factor, but ultimately hides a reasonably good job at level design. Once I adjusted the brightness, I could better see the contrast that makes landmarks and “combat blockers,” those low fences or fallen trees that stop you from backing away during a fight, much easier to spot. The graphics work for the environment the developers have built. Everything in Ebola Village looks like it is post-Cold War, so the graphics might as well correlate.

Sound is very basic. Gunfire is effective, as are the moans of the zombies. The voice actors all speak Russian, and the developers chose to provide subtitles instead of multiple language dubbing. While the vocal and sound quality is quite good, the sound mixing and syncing are lacking a little. They rely on the old PS1 trick of simply showing who is talking while the animation has the speaker’s head move back and forth. It’s a bit dated, but it fits the overall “independent” charm of the project.

Ebola Village Final Thoughts

I intended for Ebola Village to be a stop-gap until some other games arrive later this month or early February. What I got was an entertaining five hours that I would recommend to any fans of the genre. It’s a wild ride that eventually stops caring about logic altogether, and fully embraces the chaos. We start with Ebola, but somehow that leads to werewolves. I’m still not sure how a virus turns you into a lycanthrope, but here we are. Then there are the “not-quite-zombie” zombies who can still talk and plan, yet still just want to eat your face.

The absolute peak of the madness has to be the zombie cow boss battle. You read that correctly: Zombie Cow. It is every bit as hilarious and bizarre as it sounds. Because I played on Easy mode and had my trusty shotgun, the battle was reasonably easy, as were most of the bosses. Still, it’s those kinds of “what am I looking at?” moments that make independent horror so much fun to stumble upon.

To hear me talk more about Ebola Village, be sure to listen to the January 28th, 2026 episode of The Gaming Outsider Podcast around the 1:09:16 time stamp.

This review is based on a purchased PS5 copy of Ebola Village. An Xbox copy of the game was also provided by Axyos Games Entertainment for coverage purposes. It is also available on Switch and Steam.