Considering that Resident Evil Requiem belongs to the prime category of titles that determine the success of the gaming year, it is not surprising that on the eve of its release, various projects can be found that are trying to grab a few euros at the expense of the big brother. Traditionally, it’s about sloppy and completely anonymous games that are often only one person behind, and the whole thing actually came to life mostly because of YouTube and the streaming scene where people sometimes just want to see a good dumpster fire. Thank God for that, because that’s how we won this game.
| Initial price | Reviewed version | Reviewer copy |
| 20€ | PlayStation 5 | Provided by publisher |
Ebola Village is one of the scariest titles of the last few years, and although its horror does not derive from classic scare methods, it is still commendable. I can’t remember the last time I played a game that made my hands sweat when I started it, and the scenes I saw stayed alive in my eyes for hours after I stopped playing. To declare Ebola Village a shamelessly lazy AI-jointed skeleton reminiscent of the iconic Resident Evil titles would be extremely insulting, because beneath this phantasmagoric surface lies an avant-garde approach to horror that I have yet to experience.
Already in the very first frames, Ebola Village reveals how this will be an unforgettable adventure: our heroine Maria wakes up in her dilapidated apartment in the heart of the Soviet Union, sleepy-eyed, drinks a can of cola and takes a slice of pizza (what else was there to eat then?), and watches the apocalyptic state in which the entire nation has fallen due to a mysterious epidemic on television. Then he hurriedly gets dressed, leaves the apartment and goes down the stairs, where a lanky homeless man is singing some Russian songs. Maria then gets into the car, determined to find out what’s really going on here!
This is followed by a series of unrelated but superbly directed scenes in which our Maria comes to a nameless village that looks like it came out of Resident Evil 4 or 8. After voluntarily driving her car to that village that looks so remote that there are probably neither wolves nor water to drink from, our Maria says right after getting out of the car that she needs to get gas as soon as possible so that she can escape from there??
Moreover, at some point I kill the twentieth enemy when the heroine says “my grandfather” in fluent Russian and it leaves me in a state of shock – what kind of black grandfather, do we know these people? Answers to my questions were offered to me by a mystical drunkard, but only after I brought him a bottle of vodka, because what else would a Russian want in the apocalypse?
Although the story is a mystery, the gameplay is a real horror. In the two hours it took me to complete the game, I fired exactly two weapons at two types of enemies. The game has shamelessly “borrowed” numerous gameplay elements from both older and newer Resident Evil games: colorful plants, spatial puzzles, rooms for saving positions, a limited number of items, enemy design… it’s all there! However, each of these elements is done terribly, to the extent that it is practically impossible to play more than twenty minutes at a time. For God’s sake, even in the manual that explains the mechanics and controls there is a picture of Jill Valentine, only in these parts she is more likely known by the name of Jilijana Zaljubenkova.
Furthermore, it’s incredibly stressful when several opponents in a dark basement attack you at once, cornering you and locking you in an endless cycle of demolition animations that can’t be interrupted. And even if I could, my hand with the gun was stuck between the walls, so I’d still graze. Of course, that real feeling of horror is obtained in combination with terrible controls that are so unresponsive and unintuitive that at some point I thought that the old Resident Evil titles were a real walk in the park.
Ebola Village is an unusually bold project that defies the law and time. Because how else to explain a game that in the year 2026 illegally and shamelessly uses all possible elements of the mega-popular franchise and has mutated zombies that look like they fell out of the movie Mars Attacks. On the other hand, there’s a possibility that this is actually a genius indie gem that’s just too complex and lucid for my petty-bourgeois mind, but something tells me that Resident Evil is somehow better without Russian vigilantes and alcoholics drinking vodka two meters from a kindergarten occupied by Ebola-zombie comrades!