Introduction

Games come in several distinct flavors. There are the triple-A giants like Call of Duty and GTA VI. Then you have indie darlings like Hades, Shovel Knight, and Peak. There are cash grab titles, games clearly not made to be great but designed to capitalize on fan interest in a specific franchise. And then, far below even shovelware, live the scam games. Scam games are technically games, but they’re produced with minimal effort, frequently copy popular franchises, and barely earn the definition of the medium. Parody games can sometimes occupy similar territory, but those typically have genuine fun built into them and pay some form of affectionate homage to whatever they’re referencing. EBOLA VILLAGE is a parody in name only. In practice, it is a scam game, through and through.

“Developer” indie_game_studio (whose entire catalog consists exclusively of games about EBOLA) is back with EBOLA VILLAGE, a title that is transparently attempting to ride the coattails of Resident Evil Village. Even though I received a courtesy review copy from the developers, I kind of want a refund. I have never been this harsh in a review here at SunsetNerdVerse. Today, that changes. Here’s our review of EBOLA VILLAGE for the Nintendo Switch 2. Thanks to the developers for the copy…

Gameplay

Clearly inspired by 90s survival horror with a modern first-person presentation, players assume the role of Maria who… okay, let’s skip the usual setup. EBOLA VILLAGE is terrible, and the gameplay makes that apparent almost immediately. I would love to do my standard walkthrough, but we don’t have time to waste here. I need to warn you as quickly as humanly possible.

Right away, the controls feel ripped from the worst FPS games of the era it tries to copy, except even those played better. Movement feels off. Shooting feels imprecise in a way that goes beyond stylistic choice. Inventory management is, and I mean this genuinely, diabolical. I’ve rewritten this section several times because I genuinely didn’t know where to begin. Let me try to be organized about this.

EBOLA VILLAGE controls like a 90s game that was released in its alpha state. Walking, running, aiming—nothing feels precise or intentional. You’ll frequently try to open doors by physically slamming your character into them and hoping for the best. Aiming involves pointing roughly in the direction of an enemy and praying the gun fires anywhere close to where you intended. Enemies (zombies, or whatever they’re meant to be) sometimes react to being hit and sometimes just continue on as if nothing happened, regardless of what weapon you use. My first enemy took over a minute to kill because hits registered inconsistently, damage numbers appeared sporadically, and the creature seemed to decide for itself when it wanted to die. I genuinely checked my controllers. They were fine. The game is just broken.

When you’re not fighting knock-off Resident Evil zombies, you’ll be exploring environments like homes, open fields, and random buildings. Even basic item interaction is broken. The control scheme is inverted from convention—B selects, A cancels—and inventory management feels like a cruel joke. Resident Evil 1 with Chris famously gave you only six item slots as a design challenge. EBOLA VILLAGE starts you with four. Four slots means constantly running back to deposit items before continuing exploration, and since health items aren’t particularly useful (the combat barely functions anyway), you’ll spend most of your time micromanaging a tiny inventory rather than playing a game.

The puzzles follow the same pattern: blatant Resident Evil copying without any understanding of what made those puzzles work. Move a statue here, fix a fuse box there, turn on some lights in a specific room. The first puzzle requires you to restore power to a very dark room in an apartment. The problem? Your character already has a flashlight. There is no logical reason to need the lights on. EBOLA VILLAGE took the concept of environmental puzzle design and completely shattered it without replacing it with anything.

Graphics

Before booting up EBOLA VILLAGE, I checked the trailers. Surprisingly, the game looked fairly decent in promotional footage. Then I played it and thought: people are genuinely going to be scammed by this if they don’t read honest reviews first. EBOLA VILLAGE is visually horrendous in motion. The character designs try to straddle retro and modern aesthetics and land somewhere between both and neither. More damning: there are clearly stolen images from other games and media scattered throughout—including a recognizable picture of Jill from Resident Evil 3: Nemesis placed inside the game without any apparent license or permission. The jump scares are rendered at such low resolution and play so fast that they startle not through tension but through sheer assault on the eyes. Environments, character models, and enemy designs all look terrible, and this holds true across all platforms. The Switch 2 port is not the culprit here. The game simply looks this bad.

Sound

Part of me held out hope that the sound might save EBOLA VILLAGE from a complete shutout. Beloved readers, it does not. Zombie sounds are wildly inconsistent, alternating between moans and cries without any apparent logic. The voice acting, performed in Russian, is flat and uninflected throughout, delivering every line with the same absence of emotion regardless of what is being said. The music, when it appears at all, is generic and thoroughly uninspiring. Nothing in EBOLA VILLAGE‘s audio design came close to being iconic, nostalgic, or even passably atmospheric, despite the game clearly trying to evoke exactly those feelings.

Story

My last hope. EBOLA VILLAGE has to have at least a decent story, right? It can’t be bad across every single element. It can. EBOLA VILLAGE‘s story is filled with utter nonsense. Like Resident Evil, the game scatters notes and documents throughout the environment to flesh out the world. These feel less like world-building and more like an imitation of the concept of writing. One note literally jokes about how the author doesn’t know why they’re writing to anyone and signs off with “SAYONARA.” The game attempts to convey a viral outbreak devastating a town somewhere in the former USSR, with lives affected and consequences felt, but the execution never coalesces into anything coherent. Maria’s story and the world around her never come together. They remain scattered, underdeveloped, and completely lacking in any clear narrative vision.

Overall Impression

EBOLA VILLAGE may be one of the worst games I have played in 36 years of gaming. I have encountered scam titles before. Some are funny. Some are worth a single dollar for the novelty of the experience. EBOLA VILLAGE asks you for $11.99 and I cannot find a single justification for spending even one dollar of that. Nothing in this game is good. The trailers, ironically, are the strongest part of the product because they do a convincing job of making you think something worthwhile awaits.

Conclusion

I was genuinely tempted to give EBOLA VILLAGE a 1.0, but the trailers technically demonstrate some level of competence in one area of production, which is enough to save it from the absolute floor. Avoid EBOLA VILLAGE. If it were a genuine parody, or even a clumsy but affectionate homage, I could still find something kind to say about it despite its enormous list of problems. But at $11.99, you’re better off buying a fast food meal. At least that provides something briefly satisfying before fading into a distant memory. EBOLA VILLAGE is a bad game in every sense of the phrase. Avoid it like, well, EBOLA.