Listen, Resident Evil is clearly an influential series. It helped mold the enduring vision of survival-horror video games, and over the course of its nearly 30-year history, it has reinvented itself and the genre more times than one can count. There’s even an exciting new Resident Evil title coming out right around the series’ 30th anniversary, which feels like an appropriate thing to promote and throw some weight behind. So explain to me why, instead, there’s a Resident Evil knockoff called Ebola Village taking up time and space on PlayStation’s YouTube page right now?
The trailer’s description reads, “A classic horror inspired by the original survival games of the 90s, Ebola Village is a modern take on a first-person adventure where the main character, Maria, investigates a series of mysterious events.” Let me just say, “inspired” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. It’s been sitting on the official PlayStation YouTube page for over 20 hours, has amassed over 70,000 views, and roughly 7,400 downvotes. It was spotted online by social media gaming news accounts like Knoebel. “What are we doing here man,” reads one of the top comments.
Ebola Village already released on PC last year. Part of an entire series developed by “indie_games_studio” (yes, that’s the studio’s name), it costs $17 dollars and the top Steam reviews say things like, “This game is so bad it gave me Ebola irl.” Usually, it’s Unreal Engine asset-flip knockoffs of hit Steam games that are wasting space on the PlayStation Store. This time around, it’s actual junk from Steam that appears to be flowing downstream. How it ended up with a spot on the PlayStation YouTube channel remains unclear.
The entire trailer feels like a shoddily constructed homage to the Resident Evil series, and not in a campy, fun way, either. One of the opening shots shows a character driving into town, and from the first-person perspective of the scene, their fingerless gloves look almost exactly like part of Leon Kennedy‘s Resident Evil 4 fit. In another scene, a zombie (or someone otherwise infected by Ebola???) lobs an axe at the player’s head, and I swear the accompanying sound effect even sounds like it’s straight out of RE4.
I wonder if this trailer will be still available on the official PlayStation YT acc after I wake up tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/9CKCMwnle8
— Knoebel (@Knoebelbroet) January 7, 2026
To make matters worse (or better depending on who you ask), there’s also an enemy with a chainsaw and sack over their head. Come on, y’all.
RE4 isn’t the only game from the series that’s shown a bit of love here, and there are some standout “homages” to the larger RE series among the various egregious details. For example, the font used for Ebola Village‘s title appears very similar to that used by the Resident Evil remakes, and the “E” in Ebola here is crimson followed by gnarled white lettering, mirroring the logos for those games. Additionally, the main character, Maria, feels pretty “inspired” by the series’ early female protagonists, like some amalgamation of Claire Redfield and Jill Valentine.
At some point in the game, Maria even appears to flee to a remote village to “visit her mother and her ex-husband, Ruslan,” at which point the game begins to look eerily like the RE4-inspired Resident Evil Village. There’s a tall crone-like character, a fight with a werewolf, and there are even scenes set amongst distinctly Village-esque cabins. The most surprising part of the trailer is actually the absence of a Lady Dimitrescu analog, but maybe that’s one surprise Ebola Village is saving for those brave enough to actually spend money on it.
Some commenters on the trailer page couldn’t help but theorize that the video’s thumbnail was AI-generated, which would at least feel in line with the rest of the slop currently sitting on the PlayStation Store. According to the game’s Steam page, it was indeed the work of a neural network. Ebola Village is evidently releasing on console on January 23, and I cannot wait to see what borrowed tricks it has up its sleeves, at least until Ebola 4 comes out. We’ll see if that one makes it into an actual PlayStation showcase.
