Relooted is a fine heist game—but it's a better history lesson

In a 2018 report commissioned by French president Emmanuel Macron, Senegalese academic Felwine Sarr and French art historian Bénédicte Savoy assessed that 90% of the tangible cultural heritage of sub-Saharan Africa is held in Western collections—a product of centuries of colonial exploitation.

In the fictional future of Relooted, the heist-planning platformer from South African studio Nyamakop, the nations of the world have finally agreed, through an international restitution treaty, to return those artifacts to the peoples who created them. But thanks to the conveniently specific wording about applying to artifacts on public display, Western museums and private collections have been able to maintain possession of stolen African heritage by keeping it behind closed doors.

Rather than watch the can get kicked further down the road, Relooted's heroes—a former parkour artist, her ex-history professor grandmother, her security expert and perennial nuisance of a brother, and their friends—start stealing it back. The heists are good, but they make for an even better history lesson.

Relooted's proactive repatriation takes place in three phases. First, I scope out the scene with a recon drone and parkour my way onto the premises. Second, after mapping out my target artifacts and the security features protecting them, it turns into a game of inverted Mousetrap, where I tactically wedge tables in the way of security doors, preemptively shatter reinforced glass, and carefully position my fellow art liberators to construct a safe route for my eventual getaway.

Phase three is, of course, when you grab the artifacts in question and run like hell.

Building your exit route is a pleasant enough bit of puzzle-solving, and while a misstep makes Nomali lose more speed than I'd like when the camera doesn't show much of what's ahead during her 2D escape sequences, she moves with a very satisfying sense of momentum as long as I can keep my parkour clean.

It's a competent loop of heist setup and escape execution. But even when I piloted Nomali through a flawless getaway, I found myself more interested in being able to return to the relooters' hideout to learn more about the game's 70 reclaimable artifacts and their very real histories.

In pre-mission briefings and post-repilfering history entries, Relooted illustrates the full breadth and scale of colonial plundering endured by African peoples that's so often rendered through generalization or abstraction.

It tells in real, verifiable terms how sculptures like the Bangwa Queen were claimed by colonial agents as Germany attempted to entrench military control of its colonies in the early 1900s. It traces the provenance of the Asante Gold Mask, currently held in the Wallace Collection in London, to the British Army's looting of the city of Kumasi in 1874. And it allows the reclaiming of the skull of Mangi Meli, who was executed by the colonial government and whose remains, in our current day, have been lost after being sent to Europe for phrenological study.

But even as it recounts the depravities and depredations of the continent's colonial history, Relooted is anything but a bummer. It's refreshingly bright. Its band of self-appointed repatriators aren't joylessly committed to the seriousness of their work, and they don't have the aloof, turtlenecked dispassion of your typical master heisters.

Their outfits are vibrant, splashed with color even during a high stakes break-in at a high security private collection. During between-mission conversations and briefings, their hideout feels lived in and comfortable. They interact with the warmth and familiarity of family members, neighbors, and lifelong friends.

While group dynamics in games are often constrained to lanes of flat hyperproficiency or Whedonesque snark, Relooted's cast has a more grounded camaraderie. It makes their work feel humanizing—as returning what was taken should.