Give us our things!!!

Have you ever been strolling through a museum in Europe, see some ancient African mask behind a glass case, and think, “Now what is that doing here?” Well, Nyamakop, a South African video game studio with a rebellious spirit and a whole lot of heart, just made a game that lets you do something about it—virtually, of course, ARTnews reports.

At this year’s Summer Game Fest in Los Angeles, Nyamakop dropped jaws and raised fists with the reveal of Relooted—a slick, side-scrolling puzzle platformer where you and a squad of unapologetic, Robin Hood-style heroes pull off cinematic heists to reclaim stolen African artifacts from Western museums. Yes, you read that right. It’s Tomb Raider meets cultural restitution, but you’re the one bringing the culture back.

Set in a near-future reality where world powers sign a “Transatlantic Returns Treaty” to finally repatriate looted African art, Relooted imagines what happens when shady institutions find loopholes and stash precious relics in off-limits vaults instead of returning them. That’s when it’s game time—literally. You’ll scout museum layouts, plan the perfect escape route, and make off with treasures that belong to the people. 

But this isn’t just some made-up plot. Creative director Ben Myres told Epic Games that every artifact in the game is based on a real piece sitting in Western museums. 

“We looked for artifacts with great stories in terms of how they were looted,” Myres explained. “Why were they important to people? Just anything associated with them.”

One example? The Ngadji drum. Crafted by the Pokomo people in Kenya, this sacred instrument once called communities to worship and marked the rise of kings. The British confiscated it in 1902 and placed it in the British Museum. 

“The first Kenyan people to see it in the last 100 years were in the 2010s,” 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.”

Whew.

Each piece in the game is beautifully recreated in 3D based on photos and scans—no easy feat, considering many of these objects are buried in museum storage and hidden from the public eye. The only fictional part? The museums themselves. (Let’s not get sued now.)

While Nyamakop is headquartered in Johannesburg, their team represents a whole continent’s worth of creative excellence with talent from Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania. This isn’t their first rodeo either—their first game, Semblance, made history in 2018 as the first African-developed original IP to drop on a Nintendo console.

“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.”

Relooted doesn’t have a release date just yet, but the gameplay trailer is already giving high vibes and high stakes. And while you may never pull off a museum heist IRL, this is the next best—and most righteous—thing.

Now somebody put on the Burna Boy and pass the controller.

Cover photo: New South African Studio Video Game Allows You to Repatriate Stolen African Artifacts/Photo credit: Nyamakop/Epic Games