Benevolent yoinking.
At today’s Day of the Devs, Sithe Ncube, producer at South African game studio Nyamakop, shared a sobering statistic. “A French government report estimated that 90% of sub-Saharan African cultural heritage is in the possession of Western collections,” Ncube said. “That is millions upon millions of deeply important cultural, spiritual, and personal artifacts—including human remains—that aren’t in their rightful place.”
In Relooted, Nyamakop’s upcoming puzzle platformer, you’ll be staging high-tech heists for 70 of those very real artifacts to return them to the country and people where they belong.
Relooted is set in a near future where a new international treaty stipulates that all African artifacts on public display in Western museums must be returned to their country of origin. Unfortunately, the “public” in that statement has provided those museums with a convenient loophole: By relegating pieces of African heritage to private collections, they’ve been able to maintain possession.
In theory.
You’ll coordinate a crew of repatriating vigilante-thieves operating out of a hidden base in South Africa. From there, you’ll select which artifacts to reacquire from Western collections abroad, so that you can restore them to the nations where they were first taken.
Those heists will consist of three phases: In the first, you’ll scope out the facility where your target artifact is kept, mapping out cameras and security features you’ll have to navigate. In phase two, you’ll prowl the premises, avoiding raising any alerts as you carefully construct an exit route by pushing objects and practicing your imminent escape.
And then, of course, there’s phase three, where you’ll grab the artifact, trigger the alarm, and run your escape route in (hopelessly) flawless fashion before security forces descend.
In motion it looks excellent. In the Day of the Devs trailer, the player had essentially constructed their own platforming speedrun on the fly, carefully nudging bits of the environment so they could escape in a smooth sequence of sprinting, vaulting, rolling, grappling, wall-jumping, and—of course—doing cool slides beneath closing security doors.
I’m approximately 0% confident that I’ll be able to execute those heists nearly as smoothly, but I’m entirely excited to try.
You can wishlist Relooted on Steam now.
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