‘Relooted,’ a New Video Game, Invites Players to Reclaim Stolen African Artifacts

While some of the looted statues have been returned, many of them are still hundreds of miles away from their culturally significant homestead. In Relooted, the upcoming game created by South Africa-based Nyamakop Studios, players will have the chance to retake stolen Vigango statues and dozens of other ancestral artifacts forcibly taken from Africa over the centuries.

Relooted is coming at a time when the discussions for repatriation of stolen artifacts are increasingly loud and absolute, not just by Africans but also by concerned people all over the world. The game itself is a radical jump for Nyamakop following its first published game, Semblance, a puzzle-platform game where players squish, push, deform, and reshape a playdough world. Semblance was positively received for its innovative art style and satisfying puzzles.

For its second game, Nyamakop had to up the level of execution to match its much higher ambitions. “I think it’s just that the concept itself felt so important,” Ben Myres, CEO and Creative Director at Nyamakop, tells OkayAfrica. “Obviously, with African artifacts, repatriation is a huge deal, so it felt really important to make the game as high production value and high quality as possible.”

Mohale Mashigo, a writer referred to by Myres as “the queen of Africanfuturism,” was approached to helm the game’s storyline, situating the relooting of artifacts within the context of an engaging game. “It’s a heist game, right? So I spent a long time watching heist films and also understanding what heisting is, like hacking buildings basically, and I realized that this has got to be a team [effort],” Mashigo says. “Heists are always great because everybody’s got a role to play in the heist. The best part of the heist is when you see the mastermind go and recruit different people and their different personalities and how they work together.”

Led by the character Nomali, the motley crew in Relooted includes a delinquent brother obsessed with cracking safes, an ex-MMA champion, a sports scientist, and a grandma. “This may be the first family heist that includes a grandmother,” Mashigo says with ample cheer in her voice. All characters in the game are from different parts of Africa, operating from a hideout in a futuristic version of Johannesburg.

Myres, Mashigo, and their colleagues had to iterate and build their own playbook for Relooted, spending years experimenting to arrive at a game that’s unique within the canon of heist games, which are usually based on a single character and often violent.

“There are not a lot of heist games that are more like Ocean’s Eleven than anything else, and it just made sense for us to make a sort of nonviolent game because of the themes,” Myres says. “Trying to find a reference for nonviolent heist games was tricky, so it was a lot of back-and-forth between all departments – art, narrative, gameplay – just trying to make it all work. There are compromises in some places that we had to figure out. It meant there were often things the narrative and the art departments had to change, or there were certain things we knew we couldn’t change narratively, so we just had to figure it out gameplay-wise.”

Myres is conservative about sharing an exact timeline for the release of Relooted, with behind-the-scenes developments underway to bring the game to the Xbox console and to PCs, platforms where representation for African-inspired games remains very low. Last year, Cameroonian studio Kiro’o Games debuted the first African role-playing game on Xbox with Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan, which had been previously released for Microsoft Windows several years earlier.

While Africa is projected to have a gaming audience of over 400 million, the growing numbers haven’t really translated into a strong base of Africans playing games by African studios, which will be a key factor in improving the visibility of African-inspired games. Myres makes the point that the artforms that have seen crossover success, from afrobeats and amapiano to fringe film successes, started with a high level of acceptance at home.

Several factors currently hinder the continental success of games by African studios, primarily due to the fragmentation of African countries. In addition to the challenges of purchasing power, the difficulty in paying for games across countries due to differences in regulations and mobile money services is a significant challenge. Consoles are luxury items in many parts of the continent, which means that a significant amount of gaming in Africa is done on mobile devices, limiting the scope of what studios can deploy for Africans, and monetization will continue to be a challenge.

“Someone’s going to have to make a lot of money from one game,” Myres says as a possible solution to the low adoption of African games among Africans, as well as the global visibility of African-inspired games. “If that happens, it fundamentally changes who can make games about what and for whom, not just in Africa but across the gaming industry worldwide. I think once you have a reasonably-sized hit, people are like, ‘Oh my God, we can make games like that and there is an audience for it.’”

Nyamakop hopes Relooted will become very successful upon release within the next year, which would amplify the cultural significance of the game, particularly in relation to artifacts stolen from Africa. Myres mentions the Maqdala Crown as one of his favorite artifacts curated in the game, citing its significance in “how deliberate the European attempts were to make African civilization look uncivilized,” even though Africans had been creating beautiful and deeply intricate metalwork pieces centuries ago.

For Mashigo, the recency of the Vigango statues being stolen is striking. “We think about colonial times for artifacts, but this happened in the 1980s. They just went into the forest and took many of these Vigango statues, and then they were being sold in the West, and it was like a fashionable thing to have.”