Relooted — heist game lets you repatriate stolen African artifacts from Western museums

If you’ve ever fantasised about pulling off a daring heist at the British Museum to get looted treasures back to their rightful owners, then a new video game allows you to get some practice in advance. Relooted was released this month by South African developer Nyamakop, and lets players take control of parkour specialist Nomali. She’s helped by a team of safe crackers and acrobats as they seek to repatriate artifacts stolen by colonial powers from Africa.

The developers describe the game’s fictional setting as taking place in a world where:

Near the end of the 21st century, the political powers that be brokered a Transatlantic Returns Treaty, promising the repatriation of African artifacts from museums. Good old fashioned diplomacy was working — until it wasn’t. An amendment switched up the terms and conditions of which objects were to be returned.

Museums, now knowing that only publicly displayed artefacts would be given back, were slowly removing artefacts from public display.

The items you attempt to take back to their country of origin all:

…exist in real-life and are of huge cultural, historical, and spiritual significance to the people they were taken from.

British museums continue to justify their theft

These include the remains of Ethiopian Prince Alemayehu, still disgracefully being held by the benefits scroungers and rapist backers at Buckingham Palace. There’s also the severed head of Mangi Meli. German colonial forces hung and decapitated him, then took his head back to Germany as a trophy.

After acting like depraved serial killers by doing that, it’s not a surprise the nation went on to shortly thereafter carry out a genocide in Namibia against the Herero people. After the Nazi holocaust, the world’s most defective political culture is now on to its third mass extermination in about 100 years by assisting the slaughter in Gaza.

That’s the incredibly dark side to the looting and mass murder that took place in Africa under the butchers of Germany, France, Britain and others. Relooted manages to adopt an upbeat tone, however, imagining an Africanfuturist world in which a flourishing continent is asserting itself by taking back its property.

Before we reach that promised land, we have to put up with a contemporary reality in which Western museums still cling on to their stolen wares like a small child that doesn’t know how to share. Despite this immature behaviour, museums and fellow theft advocates still insist on infantilising those requesting artifact return. They do this on the basis that their original owners may not be able to look after them properly.

US & Britain wrecked Iraq, and its historical treasures

They’ve got some nerve coming out with shite like that, given the greatest recent act of mass vandalism and theft involving historical treasures came as a result of the US/British led assault of Iraq. As a result of that massive crime, enormous numbers of priceless items were plundered from Iraqi museums, some dating back thousands of years.

These belonged to thriving West Asian societies in what was the cradle of modern civilisation, while Europe was still a backwater. The Americans have been compared to the invading armies of Genghis Khan for their indiscriminate murder, and destruction of ancient culture.

The criminality of the British Museum has now become a popular meme template. Variations include the attempted theft of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and empty galleries in the event of stolen items being returned.

Relooted — a refreshing change from video game war propaganda

Having a game from independent developers with enlightened politics makes a refreshing change from the war propaganda pumped out by large publishers. The Call of Duty series has become notorious as a Muslim murder simulator, where players are routinely taken to a generic West Asian Arabistan to carry out mass slaughter. Historic US war crimes are recast as the acts of others. Once example being when the horrific killing of fleeing Iraqis in the first Gulf War was retold as a Russian atrocity.

This mental imprinting of devastated West Asian landscapes and disposable Arab people has been key in laying the foundations that enable too many in Western societies to see the Gaza holocaust as unremarkable.

It forms part of what a military-entertainment complex, in which video games and films act as weapons of mass distraction, drawing people away from the actual truth about the world.

Pleasingly, Relooted doesn’t just have good politics – it’s also an excellent game. The Canary can verify this through our own thorough hands-on investigation (it’s a hard job but someone has to do it).

It’s currently sitting at a ‘Very Positive’ rating on PC games platform Steam. This would be even higher were it not for negative reviews being cast by gammons fulminating about its ‘woke’ premise, as opposed to judging it on its merits as a game. There’s plenty of good reasons to pick up a copy, and winding these people up by funding independent African developers is just one more.

Featured image via the author