Relooted is the African relic repatriation heist game you didn’t realize you needed
6.16.2025
By Brian Crecente, Contributor
“It was quite an involved process,” said Ben Myres, the Creative Director of Relooted. “We had two researchers over two years. There were so many.”
Ultimately, the team settled on the artifacts to use in Relooted by focusing on the stories tied to 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.”
For instance, one artifact in the game is a drum from Kenya. The people of Kenya thought it was destroyed years ago, Myres said.
“This is the most spiritually important artifact to them,” he said. “They thought it was destroyed. It turns out that it’s been in the British Museum storage for the last 100 years. The first Kenyan people to see it in the last 100 years were in the 2010s. It was taken in 1870.
“The person who saw the drum was a descendant of the king it was taken from originally. So these aren't artifacts that were just found in the dust and excavated by archaeologists. These were still active cultures.”
A game idea found in a museum
The artifacts found in Relooted play a pivotal role. The game is set in an African Futurism-inspired 21st century, 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 game is a side-scrolling puzzle platformer at its heart. Players need to scout a museum, plan out their entry and escape route, and then pull off the heist in real time as alarms blare and doors slam. No violence; this is a strictly Ocean's Eleven affair.
The idea came to Myres when he and his parents were in London.
“I went to a video game bar; they went to the British Museum,” he said. “We met up for dinner later, and my mom was fueled with rage because she had just seen that they had the entire front of a temple from the south of Turkey that they’d moved. She was like, ‘This is so insane.’ And then she said, ‘You need to make this a game.'”
Myres said he had no idea how to do that, but over time, the idea started to come to light. He decided to base it in Africa because the African repatriation movement is quite big, and he settled on African artifacts as the focus.
Then the growing team started working out how to make the heist gameplay loop work.
“There aren’t a ton of non-violent references,” he said.
The loop is a challenge to master, but once you do, it delivers a blend of parkour, clever puzzle solving, and the knowledge that once things are in motion, there’s no stopping until you get to the getaway vehicle.
Relooted’s intro walks you through its basic control concepts. As long as you're holding the trigger, your character will run and essentially parkour through the environment. A tap of a face button gives you a burst of speed. These basics make it possible for you to quickly traverse the layouts of the museums: jumping up walls, slipping under ropes, running across a pressure plate, and then sliding under a closing door.
Later in the tutorial, you move things around a room to prep the path you’ll take. Finally, the game starts to introduce different crew members, each with different skills. You can give them roles in your heist, like hanging from the ceiling to give you a helpful hand to grab and swing from, or muscling open a door at the right moment.
While the movements and mechanics of play are fun to learn, it’s really only a part of the game. But that gameplay took a very long time to nail down; for quite a while, the team was struggling with it.
“We made a turn-based strategy game version of this,” Myres said. “We made sim versions.”
But it wasn’t until a physics-based destruction game called Teardown came out that things clicked.
“It had a gameplay loop which we basically lifted and transitioned to this perspective,” he said. “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, then the game is up.”
While the parkour movement through a level during your escape from a museum—relic in hand—is an element of the game, it’s not the most important one.
“Parkour is almost the reward,” Myres said. “What you’re trying to do before that is remove the resistance for your parkour because the goal is to make this route through a level free from any obstacle, so you can just flow and pop.”
A game that grew with the team
As much as the playstyle of the game evolved, the look of the game changed even more over the course of the development process, Myres said. He said that shift was a natural result of the team that grew and, with each new member, helped to mold the look and feel of Relooted.
For instance, the style of the game was initially Afrofuturist, but eventually shifted to African Futurism, a distinction that some people might not immediately understand. Where Afrofuturism is based on a sort of collage of African references with a made-up country, African Futurism is in a specific place, with specific references.
“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,” he said.
This isn’t the studio’s first title; that was Semblance, which came out in 2018 and became the first African-developed IP to launch on any Nintendo console ever.
Nyamakop’s size grows and ebbs based on the game the studio is working on. During the development of Semblance, the studio was three people full-time and seven people total. For this game, the studio peaked at 30 full-time people, and the credits will be, Myres said, much larger.
“We really built the team to make this game,” he said.
The studio is based in Johannesburg, South Africa, and focuses on African-inspired games by a team that is diverse and inclusive. They’re primarily from South Africa, but also across all of Africa.
“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.
“Most of the development team is in South Africa, but we’ve had roughly twelve people from different African countries working on the game. We have one Ethiopian environment artist at the moment.”
These are real artifacts still in museums
The topic, too, is both compelling and important to the team working on it. The artifacts are at the heart of that theme.
The team painstakingly created each of the artifacts as a 3D model using the few images that could be found.
“We had a full-time 3D artist whose only job was to look at photos or find scans that were around and then hand-model textures for them,” Myres said. “There aren’t even a lot of photos for some of the artifacts because they’ve been in storage for so long, so we have to do a little bit of an estimation.”
While the characters in the game and the people who made it both feel that the artifacts should be returned, the game itself isn’t meant to “beat people over the head with that message,” Myres said.
“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.”
None of the museums in the game are based on real-world locations; instead, they are made up. The only real places in the game are in Africa.
Once an artifact is "relooted," it can be viewed in your home base, where you’ll also learn a little something about its real history. Even creating these short descriptions was a challenge, because there is so much to say about each item. While researching them, the team created a database that is packed with all kinds of information about them.
Currently, what’s in the game is just a couple of paragraphs, but Myres said they may beef it up a bit more. The team is very cognizant about overwhelming players with too much information.
Building an authentic crew
Your crew’s headquarters is home to a museum of the artifacts you’ve grabbed in the game, and it’s also where you start each mission. In what feels a bit like an homage to the original Mission: Impossible television show, the missions feature a briefing that allows you to select which members of your crew you want to bring with you. Each has their own skillset, including a locksmith, a gadget guy, an acrobat, a hacker, and even some muscle.
While the crew includes an array of characters with different backgrounds, it wasn’t born out of a desire to represent people from all of the countries that members of the development team come from. Instead, it was a more natural process that fed into the building of the game.
They did work hard to find voice actors who accurately represent the background of the characters. So, for instance, one of the crew is Angolan, and the developers found an Angolan voice actor, which Myres said was very tricky. It wasn’t always possible to find exact fits, though. One character is from the Congo, but voiced by a South African.
“I think it’s still probably the most diverse collection of authentic African accents that’s ever been in a video game,” Myres said. “There are things that popped up in the West where you hear a single sort of African accent—which is still prominent in things like Black Panther—we really wanted to avoid that by having as many authentic African accents as possible.
“So like the little acrobat man, he has this really beautiful Francophone West African accent that’s very authentic.”
Once you select your team, you move on to the next phase of the game, which has you casing the museum, figuring out your route to the artifact, and then how to get out before your team is captured. You also learn little bits of information about the level.
Finally, you place all of your support crew, making sure they’re ready to handle their part of the heist. You are limited in where and how many crew members you can place.
Overall, the game has a very puzzle-like feel to it. Myres says he believes it’s the first true heist game.
“I say that to our development team because the game is half-action and half-puzzle,” he said. “The puzzle comes from figuring out the route. The action comes with the execution. And each level is made up of maybe five to 15 very small, simple puzzles that need to be solved. But because you have to solve them all in one go as part of the escape, that complexity does become a little overwhelming.
“So the puzzles are simple, but the entire level is essentially one big puzzle.”
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