Culture Rescue African artifacts from colonizers' museums in the heist game Relooted - Black people make a game about looting

Semblance studio Nyamakop is back with puzzles, action and a distinct story to tell.​

Jessica Conditt
Senior Editor
Sat, Jun 7, 2025, 2:44 AM GMT+3


Nyamakop

Relooted is a heist game about reclaiming African artifacts from the Western countries that stole them, developed by independent South African studio Nyamakop. Relooted is set in a future timeline where Western nations have signed a treaty to return plundered items to their African regions of origin, but things aren't going to plan. Western leaders are instead hiding the artifacts away in private collections, so it's up to a ragtag crew based in Johannesburg, South Africa, to strategize and steal them back.

Relooted is broken into missions, and each one includes a briefing about the artifact, an infiltration planning stage, and the heist. Gameplay is a mix of puzzle and action as you case each building, set up your run, and then execute the plan. Once you grab your target artifact, the security alarms go off and you have a limited amount of time to escape, so thorough preparation is key.

Spoiler: Archive

In the Day of the Devs reveal video for Relooted, producer Sithe Ncube cites a wild statistic from a pivotal 2018 report on African cultural heritage, saying, "90 percent of sub-Saharan African culture heritage is in the possession of Western collections. That is millions upon millions of deeply important cultural, spiritual and personal artifacts, including human remains, that aren't in their rightful place."

The locations in Relooted are fictional, but the 70 artifacts you have to steal back are real, and they're all currently in Western and private collections, far from their original homes and owners.

Nyamakop is one of the largest independent games studios in sub-Saharan Africa, with about 30 developers working on Relooted right now. Its previous game, the globular platformer Semblance, was the first African-developed IP to ever come to a Nintendo console, hitting the Switch in 2018. In order to get Semblance on the Switch, Nyamakop co-founder Ben Myres had to bootstrap his way around the world, buying one-way tickets and finding new partners on the fly in a daisy chain of game festival appearances. Here's how Myres explained it to Engadget at E3 2018:

"The entry curve into being an indie game developer in South Africa is like a cliff face. Because you don't have the contacts, the platform holders like Xbox, Sony. You don't have reps that live in your country. The press that matter are all here. There isn't a big enough market locally to sell to, so you have to make works to sell to the West, which means you have to go to Western shows and you have to meet Western press. So basically, if you're not traveling a ton, you're not going to be able to make it."



Nyamakop has grown significantly since 2018, and Relooted is an unabashedly African game built by a majority-POC team, Myres and Ncube said in 2024.

"There is the thing about making games for Africans — we say that a lot," Ncube told GamesIndustry.biz. "We say that should be a thing, we should make games for Africans because we're playing games that were made in the West. But will people even play those games, if you make them? And then if you make games targeting people ... even if you were to make one that's really good, there's no guarantee that you'll have a lot of people playing it. So I think there's some level of confusion, I can say, in terms of unexplored aspects of the African games market."

Relooted is in development for Steam, the Epic Games Store and Xbox Series X/S, and while it doesn't yet have a firm release date, it's available to wishlist.

Source (Archive)

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Honestly museums should just return the pieces to their respective countries. If black culture wants to burn its history we should let them. Would also cut down on Black historians in the west.

 

[D. Dimmadome]

 

[squidward tentacles]

View attachment 7471990

What happened to the buddhas of bamiyan makes me sick. Horrific, pointless destruction of such an incredible sculpture.

 

[AssignedEva]

I love how these fuckers always act as if this shit was considered all that important when the Europeans started hauling it away. It was treated as garbage by the locals. Or buried in the ground, waiting for some local to come dig it up and sell it to a European, because, again, the locals saw it as worthless garbage.

The only examples of the 70 artifacts mentioned in the game I've been able to find are the Pokomo Ngadji drum, Kenyan vigango statues and a Bwa butterfly mask.

The drum is fair enough, it was a sacred drum the Pokomo believed represented their God and used it to pass judgements and call community members for tribal meetings; it got confiscated by Colonial authorities for that reason

When Jens J. “Bull” Anderssen rode a steamboat up the Tana River in 1902, the Norwegian wood trader commissioned by the British East Africa Protectorate to oversee Pokomo land would have encountered a community already beginning to change. Missionaries had settled in some villages, and many Pokomo were reconciling the Bible’s teachings with their own traditions. Similar scenes were playing out across the continent, which is now almost entirely converted to Christianity and Islam. But the ngadji still had supreme sway over the community. Its laws were strict, and sentences carried out in its name could include death or ostracism. They were enforced by the kidjo council, which at the time was a secret society, similar in many ways to the Freemasons. They would meet at Mchelelo, the sacred grove, in the night’s darkest hours, surrounded by giant trees including the mzinga, from which the ngadji was hewed. The canopies were filled with screeching monkeys and the river with bellowing hippos. If someone outside of the kidjo spoke of, or even accidentally came across the ngadji, it was punishable by death. When the drum was transported, villages were notified beforehand, and everyone stayed indoors. When Anderssen arrived, he was expected to abide by the same rules. Instead, today’s kidjo members say, he and his soldiers stole the ngadji at gunpoint. Their predecessors begged Anderssen to at least keep the ngadji out of public sight wherever he took it. “The British took the ngadji because they had the power to do so,” Wadesa said. The kidjo, which had imposed a sense of law and order on Pokomo society, as well as looked after orphans and widows, quickly began to crumble.

The British Museum has acknowledged that the god-drum was stolen, and it's not even on display (it's in a warehouse). The Pokomo no longer worship their god-drum having converted to Christianity and Islam, but they'd like it back. The British Museum have offered to loan it and let the Pokomo royals visit the drum, but they don't want to break up their collection and they also note that the drum is actually safer in the museum than if someone's hitting the century-old drum with a massive stick in the middle of the jungle.

The vigango statues were made as a form of ancestor worship by the Mijikenda, but it's worth noting that they'd be left behind to rot when the tribe moved on and new statues would be made to transfer the spirits when the tribe settled elsewhere, so these were legally sold in shops across Kenya up until the 90s. An American museum tried returning some statues but the Kenyan authorities demanded they pay a hefty duty fee (which the museum refused) and they got stuck in an airport for years. It's a bit like discovering an architectural reclamation company has one of your ancestor's gravestones for sale to put in a garden, I guess, it might be a bit distasteful but it's not "theft" (and it sounds like the Mijikenda are intending to let these statues rot).

The Bwa butterfly mask? They're used in ceremonies but they also genuinely make these for the export market as objets d'art.

 

[anklyscr]

"90 percent of sub-Saharan African culture heritage is in the possession of Western collections. That is millions upon millions of deeply important cultural, spiritual and personal artifacts, including human remains, that aren't in their rightful place."

you can have them all back on one condition.
you take all of your countrymen and their descendants back too. And keep them out of the west.

 

[round robin]

producer Sithe Ncube

Lmao, his name is Seethe Nigger Cube. This world is parody.

 

[Overwritten Tapes]

View attachment 7471715 View attachment 7471740
Demonic africanized soyjack masks and nigger niches festooned with straw. Everything black people do is ugly, misshapen, and repulsive-- even in their fantasy video games

Why does that monkey have tits and wearing tube socks?

 

[FuckMeGentlyWithAChainsaw]

The only examples of the 70 artifacts mentioned in the game

I was looking for a list myself, but there doesn't seem to be one. Information is very scarce, even from official channels, their youtube only has that same trailer and their official site seems to list the game only as "Unannounced title"
I'm also SHOCKED that they failed to show off the true diversity of their studio, which is so very representative of the peoples of Africa.

 

[IAmNotAlpharius]

Do I get to play as Indiana Jones to stop the thefts from occurring? The whip only adds to the hilarity.

“It belongs in a museum!!” *tthhhhwwwwwwiiiiiippp*

 

[Tasty Tatty]

Why does that monkey have tits and wearing tube socks?

Maybe it's a tranny.

 

[Otterly]

This is actually a really fun premise for a game and could be quite educational if you had a multi ethnic group of people tasked with breaking into the British museum and re looting all their stuff. You could make a great kids educational game about it. One item per culture.
The subsequent levels could be even more fun
Level 2: transport the item across national boundaries and customs in hermetically sealed humidified packaging. Bonus points for pirates of you have go round the horn of africa
Level 3
Starts with your triumphant return to your own national museum.

The Pokomo no longer worship their god-drum having converted to Christianity and Islam, but they'd like it back

The rest of level three will be stopping the Islamists from destroying your pagan goods.

 

[LeChampion1992]

Just yet another piece of White man bad propaganda written by bitter black people who know deep down that they're never the originator of shit and it shows.

 

[AssignedEva]

I was looking for a list myself, but there doesn't seem to be one

I nabbed them from screenshots on their steam page, there's three screenshots of the game where you're in mission mode telling you what you're stealing.

Given the premise is apparently that you're returning these artifacts to their respective cultures, it doesn't make particular sense that they're all getting displayed in nooks of one mud brick wall lined with straw in South Africa, as now they're still not with their peoples and also are objectively in a more dangerous environment for their preservation, but I guess the game is at least educational about some lesser known artifacts.

 

[FuckMeGentlyWithAChainsaw]

it doesn't make particular sense that they're all getting displayed in nooks of one mud brick wall lined with straw in South Africa

Especially as the artifacts include human remains.
There are a lot of weird cultural things they're doing here, like how they flatten all African identities into this black uni-culture that doesn't include any North Africans, culturally Arab peoples etc.
They claim to make games for Africans but it all smells of pandering to liberal western stereotypes about African unity, which South Africans know damn well are bullshit.

 

[Otterly]

Now I love the British museum, and I know it is ‘stuff we looted’ but frankly, 90% of the stuff would have been destroyed anyway. The bulls head from Persepolis was fragmented when found and painstakingly restored - and now it’s a beautiful object seen by millions rather than rubble. I think there’s a case for returning objects in very specific circumstances (stuff taken against the will of people at the time, remains that are are known people who have relatives alive today) but I’d oppose anything going back to places that can’t conserve it, would destroy it or found objects.
I’m trying to remember what was even in the African galleries. I remember the Benin bronzes, which aren’t very old. Some textiles (always like a look at the textiles) but past that there just wasn’t much I can remember.
A lot of this stuff is really fragile, and sending it back to places who can’t conserve it (and even the museums in Egypt have had problems) when it’s the heritage of humanity is a bigger problem than politics IMO.
I haven’t been for ages, I really should but that means going to London

 

[A Sentient Cloud]

Relooted is broken into missions, and each one includes a briefing about the artifact, an infiltration planning stage, and the heist. Gameplay is a mix of puzzle and action as you case each building, set up your run, and then execute the plan. Once you grab your target artifact, the security alarms go off and you have a limited amount of time to escape, so thorough preparation is key.

Politics aside, I do actually like the idea of a heist game like this. Is there anything like this out there that's good? I know about Payday 2.

 

[AndSothisIsChristmas]

What is there that these sub-Saharans would even want back? None of it is of any practical value. Africans didn’t even manage to invent the wheel or the plow, which is first step of the tech tree stuff.

 

[Inspector Rex]

There is the thing about making games for Africans

This thing is you stop making them and instead profit off white liberals.

 

[AssignedEva]

Now I love the British museum, and I know it is ‘stuff we looted’ but frankly, 90% of the stuff would have been destroyed anyway. The bulls head from Persepolis was fragmented when found and painstakingly restored - and now it’s a beautiful object seen by millions rather than rubble. I think there’s a case for returning objects in very specific circumstances (stuff taken against the will of people at the time, remains that are are known people who have relatives alive today) but I’d oppose anything going back to places that can’t conserve it, would destroy it or found objects.
I’m trying to remember what was even in the African galleries. I remember the Benin bronzes, which aren’t very old. Some textiles (always like a look at the textiles) but past that there just wasn’t much I can remember.
A lot of this stuff is really fragile, and sending it back to places who can’t conserve it (and even the museums in Egypt have had problems) when it’s the heritage of humanity is a bigger problem than politics IMO.
I haven’t been for ages, I really should but that means going to London

I love the British Museum. Despite the name, the curators view it as a truly global museum, and it is fantastic for that - you can stroll around the galleries and see something from everywhere - and for free!

If you want to understand the world in the fourteenth century, for example, you can stroll around the halls and see examples of what people were doing - Kamakuran Japanese masks, Burmese votives, Mesoptamian astrolabes, Mamlum Syrian incense burners, French croziers, English aqumaniles. Without being too sappy, I think it's beautiful you can see how people across the world were and are. One particularly touching thing I saw there were some Mesoamerican dolls - the little girl who played with it is long dead and from a culture far different from my own, but she hugged that little doll and played with it and loved it. It's such a powerfully human moment when you see that sort of artifact.

Another one I love is the Moai.

The number of Moai outside Easter Island are in single digits (I think there's one in the Smithsonian). I know I'd never go visit Easter Island. It is amazing knowing I can go see it any time I fancy, and tourists from all over the world come to London and see this monument from an extinct culture. The ancestral worship religion of Easter Island is extinct, although I can appreciate they do want their stuff back. But it'd be such a shame if there weren't places like this museum. I wouldn't be thrilled if my distant ancestors' gravestones were on display in a foreign museum, but then they never got gravestones in the first place.

One of my bucket list things was the museum of antiquities in Syria - horrible what happened to it, but the curator ensured much of what was destroyed was plaster replicas and the originals were smuggled out - he was killed for his efforts, but he succeeded. It would be a crying shame if the collections were broken up, and while I can't defend keeping the Elgin Marbles and to a lesser extent the Benin Bronzes, I hope the marbles being returned isn't a harbinger.

 

[Gef Mongoose]

I have many thoughts on this.
1) It would be interesting and fun if this were a game like Dead By Daylight or other similar games, where a group of friends and yourself can play as the thieves/an armed security guard or Indiana Jones offshoot, that tries to capture the thieves and the artifacts.
And if the thieves get away with the artifacts, they can keep it.

2) What’s even the penalty for the game if you don’t successfully steal the artifacts?

3) The developers talk about how there isn’t a large market for African video games - maybe there isn’t a large market because they don’t have longevity and no one wants to play them. What if some black dude in South Africa wants to play a video game with a white male protagonist instead? The only people buying this game will be liberal white people and a handful of black people that play it once, and people who play it multiple times to make fun of it.

4) Have the developers taken into consideration the fragility of some of the artifacts that they would be stealing? I would think that I’d rather keep something stabilized in a controlled environment, rather than stealing it out of said environment and having it fall apart.