New heist video game lets players reclaim 70 real African artifacts from museums
An independent video game studio from South Africa plans to release a game that allows players to take back “real African artifacts from Western museums.”
Nyamakop, the developers of “Relooted,” call it an “Africanfuturist heist game,” according to a June 7 news release from Mooncat Games.
Set at the end of the 21st century, the game’s plot involves the fictional “Transatlantic Returns Treaty,” designed to facilitate the return of African artifacts from museums to their rightful owners. The treaty gets amended and museums are only obligated to return artifacts on public display, giving them a loophole to exploit, according to a press release from Nyamakop.
The game features 70 artifacts that need to be repatriated, “all of which exist in real-life and are of huge cultural, historical, and spiritual significance to the people they were taken from,” the studio said in the release. All the Western museums in the game, however, are fictional.
One of the artifacts players must reclaim is a drum from Kenya. The people of Kenya believed the drum, which held great spiritual significance, had been destroyed, when it reality, it has been in storage at the British Museum for the last century, Ben Myres, the creative director of “Relooted,” told Epic Games.
The first Kenyan person to lay eyes on the drum in 2010 was a descendant of the king from whom it was stolen in 1870, Myres told the outlet.
“We want to give people information about how important these artifacts were to the people they were taken from,” he told the outlet. “And then people can make their own decisions if they think the artifacts should stay in the museums or not.”
Game experience
Planning an escape route is just as important as the heist itself, according to the studio.
The side scroller-style game allows players to recruit a team with skills that will complement the mission and time to “case” the museums to plan their route, a process that involves a series of puzzles, creators said.
When the artifact is removed, a countdown timer starts, triggering what “should feel like you’re in the fun, montage part of a heist movie,” the studio said.
“Relooted” does not yet have a release date.
Nyamakop’s first game, Semblance, launched in 2018. It was “the first African developed IP to launch on any Nintendo console ever” and is ranked as one of Metacritic’s top 100 best PC games of 2018, according to the studio.
