"For CEO Ben Myres, Relooted's premise is deeply personal. In 2017, he and his mother visited the British Museum. "We came across the Nereid Monument, and it had been disassembled and rebuilt brick by brick in London," he told Hyperallergic. "My mum was devastated, seeing a whole piece of history uprooted, and displaced like that. She turned to me and said: 'Maybe your next game should be about this.'""
"Nyamakop first made its mark with , a puzzle game involving platform-jumping praised by the international gaming community for its originality, which was released in 2018. But Relooted marks a shift: bigger in scope, more detailed environments and character models, and more ambitious in its cultural grounding. "It's one of the largest video games ever made in Sub-Saharan Africa," Myres said, "So it was always going to be a challenge, finding the funding to make such a large thing. The entire journey has been challenging, almost by default.""
Relooted is a heist-adventure set in a futuristic Johannesburg where players join a rogue crew on stealth missions to recover over 70 African artifacts from Western museums. The game targets 13–17 hours of play and emphasizes accurate, respectful renderings of objects through dedicated research. Nyamakop expanded from a 2018 puzzle platformer to a much larger, culturally grounded project with more detailed environments and character models. The studio views the premise as personal and aims to reframe play, memory, and restitution while confronting homogenizing perceptions of Africa. The project faced funding and development challenges as one of Sub-Saharan Africa's largest games.
Read at Hyperallergic
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]