One of last year's biggest games, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, revived a hero from a bygone era -- known for retrieving precious artifacts and delivering them to Western museums. At Summer Game Fest, I got to try a game that flips this script. Relooted is all about a team of African specialists liberating artifacts from museums to bring them back to their home countries.
Relooted is a 2D puzzle-platformer which tasks players to pull off increasingly complex heists. There's a basic loop of planning -- entering a museum after hours to prepare an escape route and then picking up the artifact -- which triggers a mad dash to the exit (in my demo, a van waiting to spirit my character away).
"The vision was making a really fun heist game that is also an invitation to learn about African culture, history, ethnicities and countries, as well as learn about these real-life artifacts that exist in Western museums," said Ben Myres, creative director on Relooted and co-founder of Nyamakop, a game studio in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Returning art and artifacts back to their countries of origin has been a huge conversation in Africa for a long time, Myres noted. He first came up with the idea for Relooted during a family trip to London in late 2017, when his mother spent a day at the British Museum and was shocked to find the Nereid Monument -- a fourth-century BCE structure taken from modern-day Turkey in the 1800s. Furious, she told Myres to make a game out of returning something like the Nereid Monument -- and though extracting entire buildings proved difficult to adapt, Nyamakop dialed the scope down to repatriating artifacts and art pieces.
Relooted isn't exactly anti-Tomb Raider or anti-Indiana Jones, Myres clarified, since those heroes often take artifacts from long-lost cultures. In contrast, Relooted includes artifacts taken from living civilizations -- including ones with royal lineages that still exist today. Nyamakop uses real African artifacts, many of which are present in Western museums, in the game as a cool way for players to play out the fantasy of returning them.
"There are artifacts in this game that you can go see in the Met Museum in New York," Myres said -- including the Dahome silver buffalo.
Nyamakop
One artifact in the game highlights the injustice Myres and Nyamakop want players to help set right. The Pokomo people of Kenya once used a massive, sacred drum -- the Ngadji -- to gather the community and celebrate the enthronement of a new king. Believed to have been destroyed in 1910, the drum was actually taken years earlier by the British and now sits locked in a storeroom at the British Museum (presumably this item), according to Open Restitution Africa. The first Kenyan person to see it in a hundred years was the Pokomo prince in 2016, but there's no indication it will be returned to its people.
Relooted's rescues focus on artifacts that likewise are locked away in museums and private collections, which aren't even presented publicly for their people to visit.
Nyamakop is a diverse studio, and the Relooted team is entirely African -- with a dozen members from countries including Zambia, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Ghana and others. Myres, who hails from South Africa, acknowledged the complexity of being a white man working on a game about rescuing African artifacts -- which itself reflects the rich historical complications that Relooted is designed to help players understand.
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