African Futurist Heist Game

Reclaim real African artifacts from Western museums in Relooted.

In this new game, you control of a team of Robin Hood-like thieves who are interested in reuniting items of cultural significance with their home countries. The group gets together upon discovering that a museum is hiding a number of ancient African artifacts in a vault.

“Ironically, this idea started when my mother visited the British Museum,” states Ben Myres, creative director at Nyamakop, the creator of the game. “She was wild with rage talking about this one element where the whole front of a temple from the south of Turkey was literally moved to the museum. She said, ‘You should make this into a game.’”

Each of the artifacts in the game have been stolen from Africa and are of huge cultural, historical, and spiritual significance to the people they were taken from. Nyamakop’s developers wanted to ensure that Relooted uses only real-world examples of items countries have been trying to reclaim. Once an artifact is “relooted” you can learn about its real history.

Announcing Relooted!

Reclaim real African artifacts from Western museums in this futuristic heist game. Recruit crew members, plan escape routes, acquire the precious cargo, and bounce out as fast as you can. The game is entirely free of violence.

The game is set in an African-inspired future, in the wake of a treaty that promised to repatriate African artifacts from Western museums. But a last-minute twist soured the deal, and now your team of crew members from different African countries must work to take back 70 artifacts.

The design team looked for artifacts with great stories, then painstakingly created each one using the few images that could be found. One artifact is a drum from Kenya. The people of Kenya thought it was destroyed years ago, Myres said. It turns out that it’s been in storage at the British Museum for the last 100 years.

None of the museums in the game are real, they are entirely made up. The only real places in the game are in Africa.

Relooted delivers a blend of parkour, clever puzzle solving, and the knowledge that once things are in motion, there’s no stopping until you make it to the getaway vehicle. In one part of the game’s introduction, you quickly explore the layout of the museums by jumping up walls, slipping under ropes, running across a pressure plate, and then sliding under a closing door.

The minute you pick up one of the relics you’re trying to steal, the alarm goes off. If you don’t get out in 30 seconds, the game is over.

Nyamakop’s first game was Semblance, which came out in 2018 and was the first African-developed IP (Intellectual Property) to launch on any Nintendo console ever. The studio is based in Johannesburg, South Africa, and focuses on African-inspired games created by a diverse and inclusive team. They’re primarily from South Africa, but also across all of Africa. Learn more about Nyamakop at nyamakop.co.za.

Relooted works on the Windows platform. Preorder it at epic.gm/relooted. Play the demo at store.steampowered.com/app/3255890/Relooted.