Relooted Rescues African Artifacts With a New Heist Game

Relooted sees you liberating African artifacts from Western museums in a new parkour heist game.

Announced during Day of the Devs, Relooted makes little secret that its taking aim at real world history. After assembling a crew from various African countries, the goal is to liberate 70 artifacts that also exist in real-life, ones that "are of huge cultural, historical, and spiritual significance" to the people they were taken away from.

Playing as Nomali, you'll begin recruiting a team with their own unique individual skills and lay out the groundwork for each heist, which occurs in three stages. After locating the target, you'll need to break in and secure and escape route while solving puzzles and navigating obstacles. Once you begin extracting the artifact, a countdown timer commences and Nomali must then escape using "flow-based" parkour. Developer Nyamakop warns that poor planning leads to unfortunate consequences, and you'll operate from a hideout in Johannesburg, South Africa.

There's a personal aspect to Relooted that deeply resonates with me. Though I've always lived in the UK, I'm a third generation immigrant whose grandmother left a country once colonised by the British empire, leaving a few years before it gained independence in the 60s. Colonialism's legacy is something I'm all too aware of, I've grown up knowing what it robbed from my family, and many museums house shameful parts built upon stealing from these poorer countries. Seeing games actively tackle this awful subject is highly welcome.

Relooted is "coming soon" to Steam, EGS, and Xbox.