June 30, 2025
The game takes players on its Robin Hood-style mission to bring home these missing relics.
A new video game will offer players the virtual chance to reclaim looted African artifacts from white museums.
From South African video game studio Nyamakop comes Relooted, a game whose mission involves repatriating these stolen items. Nyamakop debuted the project at Summer Game Fest in Los Angeles in early June.
The game adopts a classic format similar to early versions of Tomb Raider, allowing players to conduct heists at museums. In the game, one joins a crew of well-intentioned thieves for the Robin Hood-style mission to make right on an abandoned treaty.
According to Ben Myres, the Creative Director of Relooted, the idea took over two years to research. He told Epic Games, a distributor for the game, about their development of the story. Myres had an abundance of stolen artifacts to use, but decided to focus on items that had their own lore surrounding them.
“We looked for artifacts with great stories in terms of how they were looted,” he said. “Why were they important to people? Just anything associated with them.”
The story is set in an AfroFuturism world of the 21st century. In its timeline, a botched treaty for the return of these African artifacts leads to the thieves taking matters into their own hands. The heist crew is also comprised of several members who all hail from different African nations, another testament to the diversity found within the project.
“Every member of the heist crew is from a specific country, culture, and ethnicity, and all of their clothing references for making their design are only from that regional culture rather than from some collage place,” added Myres.
However, they must work together to plan the elaborate heist and make it out in time without risking their exposure. Relooted works as a big puzzle executed through a gameplay loop. One’s player travels through the museum using parkour elements to run, jump, and glide through the building. Once the relic is caught, players have 30 seconds to escape and complete the heist.
The studio also built a 30-person team of full-time developers to bring this vision to life. Their work has garnered much praise and anticipation for the game’s African focus. However, this also extends to its impact on video game development on the continent.
“There are not a lot of opportunities for people here to professionally make video games,” Myres said. “So if you’re offering people here that opportunity, and it so happens that it’s an African-inspired thing—which you don’t get to see a lot of in games—people are pretty, pretty excited about doing that.”
While the game’s themes are provocative, they primarily aim to educate people about the importance of these relics, enabling them to make informed decisions regarding repatriation.
“We want to give people information about how important these artifacts were to the people they were taken from,” he said. “And then people can make their own decisions if they think the artifacts should stay in the museums or not.”
The creators of Relooted have yet to announce a release date. However, its launch will surely break barriers and spark conversation across multiple industries.
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