PLATFORM: PC, PS4/5, SWITCH, XBOX ONE/SERIES | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
In this fourth (yes!) instalment of the Ebola series, players assume the role of Marina, a young divorcee who wakes up from a nap to the rather harrowing news that an outbreak of ebola is sweeping the planet at an alarming rate. A TV broadcast advises everyone to stay at home, but Marina decides to ignore this and instead sets off to a nearby village to check on her mother. When she arrives, she quickly realises that the situation is much worse than she could have imagined, and it’s going to take all of her skill and determination to get herself and her mother out alive.
Touted as a homage to ’90s survival horror, Ebola Village takes the familiar Resident Evil formula and… well, pretty much copies it, in all honesty. You’ll explore six small locations containing ten or so buildings, solve simple puzzles, and hunt for clues and items that will allow you to access locked areas which lead to more puzzles, more clues and more items. Restrictive inventory space means that you’ll be stashing items in storage chests to retrieve later on, and the “homage” continues even further in the hordes of infected villagers, some of whom will throw gardening tools at you while others will sprout a terrifying parasitic entity from their heads, just like in Resident Evil 4.
Which all sounds great in theory, but in practice, things don’t always quite go to plan. The technical side is fairly solid apart from some occasional graphical glitches and a lot of texture pop-in, the environment is nicely grimy and unsettling, and some of the visuals are really quite impressive. On the other hand, the way the game is structured leaves a lot to be desired, often leading you on what feels like one wild goose chase after another as you endlessly traipse backwards and forwards between locations while you try to figure out which particular items the game will actually allow you to collect at any given moment. A few of the places you’ll visit seem to only exist as a reason to house certain items, with the farmhouse, church and swamp being severely underutilised despite the appearance of what appear to be a handful of potential boss-like characters who are quickly forgotten about, never to be seen again outside of their introductory cutscenes.
Although there are a lot of questionable design decisions and shall we say “less refined” ideas that make for quite a confusing and messy experience (made even more bizarre by the English subtitles that translate the dialogue from its native Russian language), Ebola Village still somehow manages to be strangely playable. It’s unlikely to bother any of the heavy hitters in the survival horror genre, but those with a higher tolerance (or even fondness) for quirky European fare are likely to get a decent enough evening’s worth of entertainment out of it.
