This New Video Game Lets You Reclaim African Artifacts By Looting Western Museums
Museums in the West tend to have one thing in common: displaying artifacts from countries that aren’t theirs. Now you can virtually reclaim these artifacts.
At the Summer Game Fest in Los Angeles, Nyamakop game studio recently announced the launch of its latest project, Relooted, a side-scrolling puzzle platformer where users can join a group of thieves who reclaim stolen artifacts from Western museums and return them to their respective countries of origin.
How do you play Relooted?
The game is set in an African Futurism-inspired 21st century, during a time when a treaty promised to repatriate African artifacts from Western museums. You’ll join a team of crew members from various African countries to attempt to retrieve at least 70 artifacts. Players must find a museum, plan out their entry and escape route, and then carry out a heist in real time.
Ben Myres, the creative director of the game, told Epic Games that the idea for Relooted came after he visited his parents in London.
“I went to a video game bar; they went to the British Museum,” he said. “We met up for dinner later, and my mom was fueled with rage because she had just seen that they had the entire front of a temple from the south of Turkey that they’d moved. She was like, ‘This is so insane.’ And then she said, ‘You need to make this a game.’”
Read: This Collective’s Digital Heists Are Liberating Looted Art From Museums To The Metaverse
Returning stolen African artifacts
The artifacts are a core component of the game, and one of the challenges developers faced was narrowing down the long list of artifacts. It took two researchers two years to compile a comprehensive list.
“We looked for artifacts with great stories in terms of how they were looted,” he said. “Why were they important to people? Just anything associated with them,” Myres said.
One of the artifacts featured in the game is the Ngadji drum, a wooden drum made by the Pokomo people in Kenya to call for worship or celebrate the start of a king’s reign. The British confiscated the drum in 1902, and it has remained in the British Museum, despite Kenyan researchers’ attempts to return the piece to their country.
Every piece in the game has been rendered into a 3D model based on available photos or scans, which was difficult as several of the artifacts have been stored in storage for a long time or are inaccessible.
A release date for Relooted has not been announced yet, but you can find a trailer here.
Image: Nyamakop/Epic Games
