Relooted Is a Heist Game About Returning African Artifacts to Their Home Countries

CNET

2 days ago

One of last year's biggest games, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, revived a hero from a bygone era -- known for retrieving precious artifacts and delivering them to Western museums. At Summer Game Fest, I got to try a game that flips this script. Relooted is all about a team of African specialists liberating artifacts from museums to bring them back to their home countries.
Relooted is a 2D puzzle-platformer which tasks players to pull off increasingly complex heists. There's a basic loop of planning -- entering a museum after hours to prepare an escape route and then picking up the artifact -- which triggers a mad dash to the exit (in my demo, a van waiting to spirit my character away).
"The vision was making a really fun heist game that is also an invitation to learn about African culture, history, ethnicities and countries, as well as learn about these real-life artifacts that exist in Western museums," said Ben Myres, creative director on Relooted and co-founder of Nyamakop, a game studio in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Returning art and artifacts back to their countries of origin has been a huge conversation in Africa for a long time, Myres noted. He first came up with the idea for Relooted during a family trip to London in late 2017, when his mother spent a day at the British Museum and was shocked to find the Nereid Monument -- a fourth-century BCE structure taken from modern-day Turkey in the 1800s. Furious, she told Myres to make a game out of returning something like the Nereid Monument -- and though extracting entire buildings proved difficult to adapt, Nyamakop dialed the scope down to repatriating artifacts and art pieces.
Relooted isn't exactly anti-Tomb Raider or anti-Indiana Jones, Myres clarified, since those heroes often take artifacts from long-lost cultures. In contrast, Relooted includes artifacts taken from living civilizations -- including ones with royal lineages that still exist today. Nyamakop uses real African artifacts, many of which are present in Western museums, in the game as a cool way for players to play out the fantasy of returning them.
"There are artifacts in this game that you can go see in the Met Museum in New York," Myres said -- including the Dahome silver buffalo.
Nyamakop
One artifact in the game highlights the injustice Myres and Nyamakop want players to help set right. The Pokomo people of Kenya once used a massive, sacred drum -- the Ngadji -- to gather the community and celebrate the enthronement of a new king. Believed to have been destroyed in 1910, the drum was actually taken years earlier by the British and now sits locked in a storeroom at the British Museum (presumably this item), according to Open Restitution Africa. The first Kenyan person to see it in a hundred years was the Pokomo prince in 2016, but there's no indication it will be returned to its people.
Relooted's rescues focus on artifacts that likewise are locked away in museums and private collections, which aren't even presented publicly for their people to visit.
Nyamakop is a diverse studio, and the Relooted team is entirely African -- with a dozen members from countries including Zambia, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Ghana and others. Myres, who hails from South Africa, acknowledged the complexity of being a white man working on a game about rescuing African artifacts -- which itself reflects the rich historical complications that Relooted is designed to help players understand.
At Summer Game Fest, Nyamakop creative director Ben Myres demoed Relooted to attendees.
David Lumb/CNET
"In terms of being a white guy working on this, it wasn't Black people who stole artifacts at the end of the day. If you make it a Black person problem, you sort of wash your hands of essentially what Europe and the US and your ancestors did in terms of the repatriation of these artifacts," Myres said. "So these artifacts are cool and important and interesting, and I also think it's our shared responsibility to repatriate them to where they belong."
Myres presented the game solo at Summer Games Fest, after another Relooted team member was denied a visa over immigration concerns, as Aftermath reported.
Nyamakop
I'm putting a team together: Art heists in Relooted
The game's creators set out to create a team of specialists that each have a role in Relooted's heists. Every member is from a different country, region and ethnicity based on heist archetypes, Myres said, and players will acquire new members based on specific needs for the next job. But making a heist game was a challenge to design.
"There's not a lot of great gameplay reference for non-violent heist games in the vein of films like Ocean's 11," Myres said. "The really great heist films aren't always that violent. There's these plans that go off without a hitch, and so trying to figure out how to do that gameplay was really, really tricky."
Few games resembled what Nyamakop aimed to create, though the team drew inspiration from sources as far afield as the parkour movement in Mirror's Edge and the TV show Leverage -- one of the few heist stories that isn't just about stealing money. They found inspiration in Teardown, a 2022 physics-based destruction game where players have unlimited time to plan, but once the action begins, a countdown starts -- a gameplay loop they saw as a perfect fit for their own project.
"Specifically we wanted to make it feel like you're in a heist montage for a movie of your own plan," Myres said.
Put simply, every level is made up of five to 15 simple puzzles that you have to pre-plan solutions for to escape. You're essentially removing resistance, Myres said. The game places as much importance on planning a route as it does executing it in a parkour-heavy rush to escape.
"Every level is like a broken Rube Goldberg machine that you have to solve so you can flow through it," Myres said.
Nyamakop
Some of those solutions involve gadgets from the near-future, and I asked if that would qualify the game as being Afrofuturist, a science fiction subgenre encompassing works from Sun Ra to Octavia Butler to Marvel's Black Panther. But as Myres pointed out, Afrofuturism is a collage of African cultural references in a made-up place or invented country (like Wakanda).
Instead, Relooted is African Futurism, which deals in real people, places and cultures set in the future. The between-missions hideout lies in a Johannesburg 80 years in the future, and other countries in Africa are realistically represented. In a twist on the Western habit of using monolithic stand-ins for Asia and Africa, in Relooted you can visit parodies of Europe and America, called the Old World and the Shiny Place, respectively.
"Often when Africa is represented, you see it either in the past as very tribal, or as three mud huts and someone that needs to be saved," Myres said. "Africans don't get to see themselves set in the future. They don't get to dream and imagine a utopia. So this is one of the few examples of real places in Africa imagined in the future."