Relooted Is A Big Black Middle Finger To History Controlled By White People

I did not expect that playing Relooted would hurt so much. It’s a game that offers me the chance to return African artifacts to their home countries from the culturally genocidal institutions that stole them. In a word: Very much my shit. But instead of fist pumps and “fuck yeah!”s, playing Relooted left me with bittersweet resignation tinged with overwhelming rage.

When I first discovered Relooted at Summer Game Fest, I did indeed greet it with a hearty, “fuck yeah.” Developed by Nyamakop, a South African game studio based in Johannesburg, Relooted was the first time I’d seen the typical “treasure hunter” narrative turned on its head. You play as Nomali, a parkour enthusiast called home to Johannesburg to “steal” artifacts from museums and collectors in order to return them to their countries of origin. Throughout the game, you must direct Nomali and her band of merry misfits through every step of the heists. You can research where the artifacts are held, investigate security measures, choose where to enter the building, and plan your escape route. During the game, Nomali recruits more team members—each with their own specialized skills—to help with mission-critical tasks like unlocking doors or hacking security robots. Then, when it’s go time, you must use Nomali’s parkour skills combined with your teammates’ abilities to escape.

Relooted is a puzzle platformer that captures the tension between methodical planning and frenetic action so well that it feels like you’re playing an Ocean’s movie. I often spent 20-40 minutes setting up the most efficient, safest route through a building, a plan that would then only take seconds to execute. The planning phase is the puzzle part of the game’s equation. Buildings are arranged with a collection of locked doors, reinforced glass windows, sensors, pressure plates, and more that Nomali must navigate without triggering the alarms before she’s ready to run. 

Before you can flee with the artifacts, you must first plan your route and assign teammates.

Setting off an alarm prematurely causes every security door to shut and unleashes robots out for your blood, or at least your incarceration. Your teammates can help you neutralize these challenges with their special abilities. Trevor, Nomali’s brother, can unlock doors to open up potential escape routes. If an exit is guarded by an auto-turret, you can direct your hacker Cryptic to disable it, and if there’s a window you need to reach but it’s too high, Ndedi the acrobat can use his zip-line to get you up there. At the end of every heist, you’re scored based on how effectively you parkoured, how fast you were, and how many artifacts you liberated.

With multiple variables like where to enter, where to exit, and what teammates to assign and where, no two heists are the same. You can further adjust the game’s challenge by enabling or disabling features like the gadget that can map out the most efficient route through a building. You can also make things harder for yourself by limiting how often you can call upon your teammates, forcing you to choose only the most strategic deployments. But what makes Relooted such a great heist game is that, as in any heist movie, shit will inevitably go wrong. 

Panicked by blaring alarms or a mistimed jump, I’d be forced to plan a new escape route on the fly and that felt incredible, like I was the Black Danny Ocean. With so many ways a heist could go down, Relooted demands multiple playthroughs, which is easily achievable since it only took me 17 hours to complete.

I played on Steam Deck and PC, and both platforms suffered from framerate issues and bugs. During one particularly frustrating moment, I kept running into a graphical glitch that prevented me from seeing Nomali at all, requiring two restarts and an hour’s worth of lost planning time. Platforming can also be onerously precise. There were several moments in which I lost so much time trying to find different solutions to a platforming problem I had already solved because my jump distance or angle was just barely off.

But Relooted’s technical issues won’t keep me from the unfinished business I have with it. Jobs often have one or two artifacts that must be retrieved plus extras that award you a higher score, good for nothing but the personal satisfaction that you are returning items, often human remains, to their rightful homes. And I still have a few missing pieces out there.

At first, I felt Relooted’s story was merely a neat little adventure featuring plucky heroes taking back what’s theirs. But what won me over, and what was ultimately responsible for the white hot rage I feel in my chest when I think about this game, is that the artifacts I’m stealing are all real. Despite the fantastical Afrofuturistic setting with flying cars and cool gadgets, every artifact I stole currently exists in the real world.

And none of them are where they belong.

• Back-of-the-box quote:

  "What if it *doesn't* belong in a museum?"

• Developer:

  Nyamakop

• Type of game:

  Puzzle platformer

• Liked:

  The wish fulfillment of stealing back priceless artifacts, and the way the action really feels like a heist movie.

• Disliked:

  Graphical and performance issues.

• Platforms:

  PC, Xbox Series X|S

• Played:

  17 hours

In the game, Nomali’s grandmother, a professor of African art and culture, explained that for decades African countries have been petitioning museums across the world to have their artifacts returned with very little success. That’s real. In some cases artifacts are returned, like in 2015 when the Cleveland Museum of Art returned a statue of the Hindu deity Haunaman to its native Cambodia. But in other cases, like with the Benin Bronzes—which are included among the many real objects you can liberate in the game—a museum might only “loan” an item to a museum for a short period of time. In other cases, though, demands for repatriation of stolen artifacts are simply ignored. In 2017, France rejected Benin’s request to return thousands of items looted from the Kingdom of Dahomey in the 1890s.

Those items and many more across the continent were stolen during a historical period between 1880-1920 colloquially known as the scramble (or rape) of Africa. European countries, seeking to feed their appetite for colonial expansion and all the wealth extraction that entails, divided up the continent, killing and enslaving anybody that resisted. For decades, colonizers looted (often from burial sites) priceless works from the Kingdom of Dahomey, Great Zimbabwe, and many of Africa’s greatest civilizations. Works that held significant artistic, cultural, or religious significance were taken from their homes and put on display in museums or private collections like spoils of war, but disguised by paternalistic euphemisms like cultural preservation or, more simply, “It belongs in a museum.” 

African nations have since won freedom from their colonial oppression and European countries have issued formal apologies recognizing the terror and grief their imperial regimes have caused. But that sense of accountability often disappears when countries ask for their stolen items back. The Washington Post report covering Benin’s 2017 petition to France included a quote from the French government that read, “The goods you mention have been integrated for a long time, some for more than a century, into the public assets of the French state.”

Thanks to characters like Indiana Jones, Lara Croft, Nathan Drake, and more, pop culture has sanitized the image of the grave robber into that of the historically conscious treasure hunter and has abstracted and flattened the things they stole, robbing them of their significance. Relooted restores that significance, providing intricate detail on the pieces you’re liberating, and sometimes reestablishes context for items not widely acknowledged as looted artifacts. As a lover of British royal history, I can vividly picture The Sovereign’s Scepter but I’ve never thought about where the big-ass diamond featured in it came from. The game’s final heist has Nomali stealing it along with the rest of the British crown jewels because they were made from diamonds looted from Great Zimbabwe.

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Often, you’re liberating burial vessels or human remains. Nomali and crew don’t talk about skulls or toros as mere anthropological curiosities. They get pronouns and names. It was a powerful, painful reminder that those bones were once living people who deserved more dignity than being put on display like so much fine china. For as much as I enjoyed the game, I hated the feeling that this fantasy of stealing back the bones of venerated ancestors would be the closest thing to justice that my extended cultural family would ever get. But Relooted isn’t only painful, it’s also joyful and a clever rebuke of the treasure hunter stories it inverts.

In Tomb Raider and Uncharted, Lara Croft and Nathan Drake typically work alone. Nomali has her family and friends with her every step of the way. The countries where stolen items are held are never explicitly named but given generic descriptors like “the old world” for Europe or “the shiny place” for America. Meanwhile, the game will take the time to explain that the Kingdom of Benin is actually in Nigeria while the actual country of Benin was previously known as Dahomey. It’s neat, in a society that focuses on western culture to the exclusion of damn near everything else, to have a game that centers the African continent and does the work to distinguish its many different cultures and countries instead of lumping them into one big mass. You can even see that outside of the game in the cheeky way the developers at Nyamakop announced Relooted’s release timing. Instead of the tradition of sharing a map calling out when a game launches in cities across the globe while leaving Africa totally blank, Nyamakop left the entire world blank except for Africa.

https://bsky.app/profile/nyamakop.co.za/post/3megszauges2j

Breaking into a crypt and helping yourself to whatever funeral goods are lying around is a violent act. But in fiction, it’s become a quaint adventure trope lionized in popular culture through movies, TV shows, and video games. “It belongs in a museum” somehow makes everything okay, completely eliding the fact that the thieves are often the ones choosing the museums that are thousands of miles away from the people to which those stolen goods belong.

Relooted is a big, Black middle finger to the lingering violence of colonialism. It’s a game that does more than ask, “What if Indiana Jones was actually the good guy he claims he is?” It’s spiritual wish fulfillment. Instead of relying on the benevolence of colonizers to do the right thing, Relooted lets you take back what should have never left in the first place.