Ebola Village arrives on PS5 wearing its influences like a borrowed coat from 1998, proudly channelling the era of fixed-camera survival horror, dodgy voice acting and suspiciously placed herbs. On paper, that sort of retro homage can be charming. In practice, it feels less like a loving tribute and more like rummaging through a bargain bin of old ideas.
Gaming Heaven
To be fair, there’s a certain scrappy appeal to it. The setting – a crumbling Russian village gripped by a biological outbreak – has atmosphere, and the environments occasionally show surprising detail for a small team. Wandering through bleak flats, muddy streets and abandoned buildings can be tense in a quiet, low-budget horror film sort of way.
There are puzzles scattered throughout that follow classic survival-horror logic: find a fuse, unlock a door, backtrack with purpose. They’re simple but serviceable. Combat, once you wrestle with it, has a bit of weight, and blasting infected enemies with a shotgun provides the expected messy results. If you enjoy inventory Tetris and shuffling items between storage boxes, you’ll feel right at home.
Gaming Hell
Unfortunately, everything around those small positives feels awkward. Movement is stiff, interactions are fiddly, and trying to select objects placed close together becomes a mini-game in itself. The first-person perspective doesn’t help; it just makes the clunkiness more immediate.
The story has B-movie charm but is dragged down by stilted translation and flat delivery. Characters talk, yet rarely say anything interesting. Much of the experience boils down to trudging back and forth, juggling limited pockets and wondering why modern games stopped doing this in the first place.
Visually it’s inconsistent too: environments look decent, while character models appear to have escaped from an earlier console generation.
Final Judgement
Ebola Village isn’t outright dreadful, just relentlessly dated. It copies the classics without understanding why they worked. Hardcore nostalgia hunters might find a few hours of grim amusement, but most players will feel like they’ve contracted something mildly inconvenient rather than terrifying.
