“It belongs in a museum.”
It’s an oft-repeated line from Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones, expressing his belief that historical artifacts should be preserved for record-keeping and scholarly study. (And kept out of Nazi hands — big agree on that one.) But in recent years, the ethics of museums have fallen under scrutiny. Essentially: Can a museum exist ethically if it houses stolen goods? So many museums across Europe and North America are keepers of artifacts looted from foreign lands. Sometimes, the museums continue to hold on to those artifacts even when the governments of the countries of origin request their return.
Instead of waiting for a foreign body to give their history back, the characters of developer Nyamakop’s Relooted take matters into their own hands. The Africanfuturist puzzle heist game follows a crew who venture to foreign museums to reclaim what was taken from African lands and peoples. It succeeds as a teaching tool, working as a digital museum itself, while also doubling as a tense heist game whose levels act as puzzles.
In the late-21st century, world powers have agreed to the Transatlantic Returns Treaty, which will allow for the return of African artifacts from western museums back to their countries of origin. The people running the museums clearly don’t want this to happen, as they exercise a loophole to make it so only artifacts on display need to be returned. Meaning, all the artifacts that were supposed to be sent back are now being locked up in storage. Basically, the museums are throwing temper tantrums: “If I can’t have it, no one can.”
That’s where Nomali and her crew come in. You play as a former parkour specialist who gradually assembles a team to ensure the jobs go smoothly. Cryptic is an expert teenage hacker, while Ndedi is a swift acrobat who helps Nomali navigate levels. Together, Nomali’s crew has dozens of artifacts to repatriate together. Relooted is grounded in that all the in-game artifacts (and sometimes human remains) exist in the real world; these are real pieces of history that Nomali and crew are putting their necks on the line to preserve.
In some ways, Relooted serves as a power fantasy for those who want to liberate the British Museum’s archives, but can’t. For example, it allows you to take back Benin Bronzes that still haven’t been returned. Like so many African artifacts, the Bronzes, which tell the history of the Edo people, were looted by British soldiers in the 19th century and disseminated across European and American museums. While some Benin Bronzes have been returned, The British Museum still holds onto its collection.
Repatriating artifacts can be a slow process in the real world, but in Relooted, there’s no bureaucratic red tape to cut through. Museums have been ordered to return what they once stole. They found a loophole not to. Go take repatriation in your own hands.
Like any good heist, recovering the locked-away artifacts starts first with having a good plan. Before diving in to reloot the goods, you’ll scour museums and private collections with a drone. You’ll scope out potential hang-ups, like robot guards, and plot your escape routes. Each level has optional objectives that will make your operation trickier if you want to snag them too. Once an alarm goes off, you’ll only have a limited time to escape scott free. Finding the right route to grab everything and escape is like slotting the pieces of a puzzle together to create one clear and cohesive image.
With a plan in place, you’ll work to ensure Nomali’s escape route is unobstructed. This means maneuvering tables to keep doors from fully closing, hacking robot guards to ensure they won’t arrest you, placing your allies in key places to aid your parkouring, and more. The levels effectively work as puzzles with multiple solutions that are up to you to discover.
Meticulously planning an escape route and executing it can be exhilarating at first, but grows somewhat rote the more you play. Each level feels functionally the same with similar obstacles to overcome. I wasn’t doing anything fundamentally different in hour five with Relooted than in hour one; I just had more obstacles to overcome on Nomali’s path. Still, racing away with five artifacts in tow as a drone chases Nomali down makes for an exciting finish to each level.
Relooted is ultimately bogged down by its pacing. I’d like to go from museum heist to museum heist, maintaining my crew’s momentum, but too many levels have unnecessary and sometimes drawn-out tutorials in between them. Each time you recruit a new member, you’re sent to the VR lab to learn how their abilities can help Nomali in a heist. (And sometimes have to do back-to-back VR training levels before getting a new mission.) They drag, and organically learning a new member’s abilities during a main mission would have been a way to kill two birds with one stone.
While Indiana Jones’ iconic “It belongs in a museum” line was once looked on fondly, now we have to wonder: Does it really belong in a museum? The “it” there can stand in for so many stolen goods, pilfered from war-torn countries or stolen from indigenous peoples. Through well-plotted, puzzle-like heists, Relooted makes the argument that artifacts like the Bangwa Queen statue and an Ejaghaw Headdress don’t belong in museums, but rather with the people they were stolen from.
Relooted will be released Feb. 10 on Windows PC and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on Steam Deck using a prerelease download code provided by Nyamakop. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
