African Game Reimagines Reclaiming African Artefacts

A newly released video game is drawing attention for placing players in the role of African characters tasked with retrieving looted cultural treasures from Western museum collections.

Titled Relooted, the game was developed by South Africa-based studio Nyamakop and launched last week on PC and consoles. It arrives amid renewed global debate over the return of African artefacts held in Europe and the United States.

The game’s creator, Ben Myres, said the idea emerged during a family visit to the British Museum in London. According to Myres, his mother reacted strongly after seeing the Nereid Monument, a historic structure removed from Turkey during the 19th century.

That moment, he said, sparked the concept of a game centred on reclaiming heritage. Rather than focusing on large monuments, the developers chose smaller but symbolically powerful African artefacts, including Asante gold held at the Wallace Collection and the Kabwe 1 skull housed at the Natural History Museum.

Set in the late 21st century, Relooted imagines a future in which Western institutions have agreed to return artefacts but continue to delay the process. Players assemble a diverse team — including a hacker, a parkour specialist and a getaway driver — to recover more than 70 real-world African cultural objects through puzzle-solving and coordinated missions.

While the artefacts themselves are based on real collections in the UK, Europe and the US, the game avoids recreating actual museums. Instead, it uses stylised settings that parody Western spaces, a design choice Myres said was both practical and intentional.

He explained that the game also aims to reverse long-standing stereotypes, using humour and exaggeration to reflect how Africa has often been portrayed in Western media. The primary audience, he added, is young Africans living abroad who are interested in reconnecting with their cultural history.

Myres said the project took between six and eight years to complete and cost several million pounds. Rather than pushing a fixed stance on restitution, he described the game as an educational invitation.

“The question is not answered for the player,” he said. “It’s simply asking whether those artefacts should still be where they are.”

Pressure has been mounting on UK institutions in recent years to return contested cultural objects, though several national museums remain legally restricted from permanently repatriating items in their collections.