A forthcoming South African video game seeks to tackle centuries of cultural theft by letting players reclaim looted African artifacts from Western museums in a series of high-tech heist adventures.
Relooted, revealed at the Summer Game Fest in Los Angeles earlier in June by Johannesburg-based developer Nyamakop, sees players infiltrate heavily guarded institutions to retrieve real-world African artifacts taken during the colonial era and locked away in foreign museums and private collections.
At its core, Relooted is a stealth-driven game that blends fast-paced movement, environmental puzzles and dramatic escape sequences inspired by parkour and speedrunning.
Behind the gameplay, the concept is rooted in history and the debate over the return of cultural artifacts. Players take on the role of a member of a futuristic African crew tasked with returning 70 actual stolen artifacts to the continent, with items like the Ethiopian Maqdala manuscripts and Zambia’s Broken Hill Skull all featuring.
“A French government report estimated that 90 per cent of sub-Saharan African cultural heritage is in the possession of Western collections,” Nyamakop producer Sithe Ncube told PC Gamer.
“That is millions upon millions of deeply important cultural, spiritual, and personal artifacts – including human remains – that aren’t in their rightful place.”
Artifacts recovered aren’t just treated as trophies but returned to the crew’s safehouse in South Africa where players can explore their histories, significance, and the stories of how they were taken.
For the developers, this cultural significance of the artifacts is as essential as the action.
“We looked for artifacts with great stories in terms of how they were looted,” creative director Ben Myres told Epic Games. “Why were they important to people? Just anything associated with them.”
An example is the Ngadji drum from Kenya, believed destroyed but actually stored in the British Museum for over a century.
“The first Kenyan people to see it in the last 100 years were in the 2010s. It was taken in 1870,” Myres said.
“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.”
In recent years, several artifact returns have highlighted the growing international reckoning with looted African heritage. In February 2024, seven royal artifacts looted from British-colonised Ghana’s Asante Kingdom were returned by the UCLA’s Fowler Museum after over 150 years abroad. At the official handover in Kumasi, King Otumfuo Osei Tutu II remarked: “The white man came into Asanteman to loot and destroy it.”
In August 2022, London’s Horniman Museum returned to Nigeria a collection of Benin Bronzes, artifacts stolen by British troops in February 1897. Earlier this year, the British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum loaned to Ghana gold and silver pieces, acknowledged by the V&A director as being equivalent to “our Crown Jewels .
During the game development, Nyamakop worked with African historians, artists and linguists to ground its vision in specific cultural traditions.
The studio had just three members when it launched debut title Semblance but grew over the years into a 30-person team spread across Africa, from Nigeria and Ethiopia to Zimbabwe, Ghana, and Tanzania.
“There are not a lot of opportunities for people here to professionally make video games. 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,” Myres said.
Even as the game itself seeks to break new ground, the team faces real-world challenges. A Nyamakop developer was unable to attend the US showcase for Relooted due to their visa being denied, an experience that mirrored the very inequalities the game was intended to critique.
“It’s kind of f***ed up to be making a game about reclaiming African artifacts that are in Western countries and Africans [on the team] can’t even visit those artifacts. Hundreds of dollars in visa application fees, and then it might get declined,” Myres told Aftermath.
While the studio is yet to announce a release date for Relooted, it is available to wishlist on Steam, Xbox Series X|S, and the Epic Games Store.
