You’re more likely to die from salmonella, hypothermia, or frustration before the ebola gets you in Indie Games Studio’s Ebola Village on the PS5. Quite a bizarre mish-mash of genres and pop cultural influences, I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on aside from the obvious: there’s a pandemic, people are infected, then they kill others. It was more to do with the actual character, Maria.
To begin with, Maria starts the game in her undies and living in squalor. She’s getting divorced from her husband, Ruslan, after a turbulent relationship, and is left with nothing. Seemingly, a lack of clothes, too. Perhaps we know who the target audience is now. Without any clear idea other than surmising, I may as well get dressed and leave the apartment, I first have to hunt around the room until finding a notebook, then, not particularly intuitively, use that with the phone in the porch to call my mum, whom I need to ‘rescue’. Now I can get dressed.
Donning some classic video game garb, I leave the apartment, go down a few steps to see a beatnik playing an acoustic guitar on the landing, to then informed I cannot leave the building without my driving licence. To obtain my licence means locating a set of bolt cutters, breaking into another, unlinked apartment, stealing a fuse, returning to outside my apartment to install, accessing the bathroom (which was dark and scary), collecting my licence and subsequently heading out to break down without any fuel, just like ‘the movie’. What movie?! And why is it such an ordeal to pick anything up in this game without having to keep making slight adjustments?!?
So, to revisit the opening sentence, salmonella comes from Maria’s hygiene, the hypothermia from sitting around in tighty whities, and the frustration from the gameplay mechanics and sketchy translations. The English translations aren’t unreadable, but they’re incoherent, as are the objectives in Ebola Village. Trying to fill in the blanks on what the heck is happening, upon the car breaking down, there’s a crime scene where you’re supposed to find a gun. Before locating that, you read a crime file speaking of a madman who treats people’s haemorrhoids with cucumbers. Is that another bad translation, or is this game really messed up or ahead of its time?
The saving graces of Ebola Village are the visuals and combat. The graphics were constantly sharp with some pretty decent textures that made the locations quite vile in a good way, as well as clear to see what it is you’re actually doing. Taking a large amount of inspiration from the Resident Evil series – from combining ammo and herbs, to some of the loading screens looking a little like Raccoon City, the game takes place from a first-person perspective throughout, unless Maria is showing off a bit of T & A, in which case that’s third-person to keep you interested.
Depending on your difficulty setting, ammo scarcity isn’t as punishing as in other survival horror types, plus shooting off limbs of the infected is fun. Think a modern House of the Dead 2 with less corn. While it employs the same inventory screens and combination mechanics as Resident Evil, reloading and general shooting are fluid, and you aren’t caught with your pants down too much. Except for the opening scene. My only criticism is that the controls on the DualSense are sensitive, so it takes some playing around with/getting used to until you can become a real sharpshooter. Which probably won’t happen, but… y’know.
Ebola Village isn’t an FPS per se, as it doesn’t work so well when a little urgency is involved. Imagine the crowd rush of Resident Evil 4 zombies in first-person mode as if wearing beer goggles on a boat. Naked. That last bit makes it special. The best way I can describe it is when using your desktop PC (or Mac) at a silly resolution where your cursor is hard to see, and you have to shake the mouse to see it. That’s a bit like this. You aren’t looking for a crosshair, but making frequent adjustments to both shoot and interact with items. It’s not as bad as I’m making it sound, but finicky nevertheless.
Besides the shoddy narrative and translations, serviceable combat with head-pulverising damage, there are also puzzles, too. Once again, these borrow from the Resident Evil school of thought; providing that 90s throwback for an element of nostalgia and also as an excuse if you fluff it up and say, “Hey, games used to be like this in the 90s”. ‘tis true, I was there, but though game wasn’t made with 90s tech – it’s using the Unreal Engine. Whether that’s enough for you to brave it and wear a mask again as if it were 2020 depends on you and your budget. Ebola Village isn’t bad, it’s just whether you can stomach the fiddly controls, bad translations and folk who desperately need to do something with their skincare routine.
