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Title: Rescue African artifacts from colonizers' museums in the heist game
Relooted

Date: Fri, 06 Jun 2025 23:44:51 +0000
Link: https://www.engadget.com/gaming/rescue-africa...

Relooted is a heist game about reclaiming African artifacts from the Western
countries that stole them, developed by independent South African studio
Nyamakop. Relooted is set in a future timeline where Western nations have
signed a treaty to return plundered items to their African regions of origin,
but things aren't going to plan. Western leaders are instead hiding the
artifacts away in private collections, so it's up to a ragtag crew based in
Johannesburg, South Africa, to strategize and steal them back.

Relooted is broken into missions, and each one includes a briefing about the
artifact, an infiltration planning stage, and the heist. Gameplay is a mix of
puzzle and action as you case each building, set up your run, and then
execute the plan. Once you grab your target artifact, the security alarms go
off and you have a limited amount of time to escape, so thorough preparation
is key.

In the Day of the Devs reveal video for Relooted, producer Sithe Ncube cites
a wild statistic from a pivotal 2018 report on African cultural heritage,
saying, "90 percent of sub-Saharan African culture heritage is in the
possession of Western collections. That is millions upon millions of deeply
important cultural, spiritual and personal artifacts, including human
remains, that aren't in their rightful place."

The locations in Relooted are fictional, but the 70 artifacts you have to
steal back are real, and they're all currently in Western and private
collections, far from their original homes and owners.

Nyamakop is one of the largest independent games studios in sub-Saharan
Africa, with about 30 developers working on Relooted right now. Its previous
game, the globular platformer Semblance, was the first African-developed IP
to ever come to a Nintendo console, hitting the Switch in 2018. In order to
get Semblance on the Switch, Nyamakop co-founder Ben Myres had to bootstrap
his way around the world, buying one-way tickets and finding new partners on
the fly in a daisy chain of game festival appearances. Here's how Myres
explained it to Engadget at E3 2018:

"The entry curve into being an indie game developer in South Africa is like a
cliff face. Because you don't have the contacts, the platform holders like
Xbox, Sony. You don't have reps that live in your country. The press that
matter are all here. There isn't a big enough market locally to sell to, so
you have to make works to sell to the West, which means you have to go to
Western shows and you have to meet Western press. So basically, if you're not
traveling a ton, you're not going to be able to make it."

Nyamakop has grown significantly since 2018, and Relooted is an unabashedly
African game built by a majority-POC team, Myres and Ncube said in 2024.

"There is the thing about making games for Africans ΓÇö we say that a lot,"
Ncube told GamesIndustry.biz. "We say that should be a thing, we should make
games for Africans because we're playing games that were made in the West.
But will people even play those games, if you make them? And then if you make
games targeting people ... even if you were to make one that's really good,
there's no guarantee that you'll have a lot of people playing it. So I think
there's some level of confusion, I can say, in terms of unexplored aspects of
the African games market."

Relooted is in development for Steam, the Epic Games Store and Xbox Series
X/S, and while it doesn't yet have a firm release date, it's available to
wishlist.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at
https://www.engadget.com/gaming/rescue-africa...
museums-in-the-heist-game-relooted-000035161.html?src=rss

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