Loot is such a common gaming term used to describe any kind of reward a player can obtain, be it trivial trinkets or something that gives you a gameplay buff, that it's easy to forget its real definition refers to stolen valuables, often as a result of war. It's something that Relooted confronts head-on, as it's about stealing real artifacts, or rather, stealing back African artifacts that had been stolen away from Africa over centuries of plundering the continent that it has endured from Western colonialism.
While repatriation has been an ongoing debate for decades, the idea first came to Ben Myres, creative director at South Africa-based indie studio Nykamakop, during a trip to London some years ago.
"My parents went to the British Museum, and when we met up in the evening, my mum was just incensed because she had seen something called the Nereid Monument, which is basically a Lycian tomb, a building that had been moved brick by brick into the British Museum," he tells me. "I think she was just sort of shocked by the scale and audacity of stealing a building. She sort of flippantly said, 'You should make a game about reclaiming this building.'"
The importance of real life
Although Myres struggled to figure out how to make a fun game out of moving a building out of another building, there are fortunately (for lack of a better word) numerous other stolen artifacts that could be included in a game set in the near future where a pan-African team works together to reclaim for the continent. "I don't think people realise the scale of the looting and also maybe don't even realise when they see an artifact in a museum that it was looted. So it felt important to make them real artifacts."
According to a 2018 French report, approximately 90% of all cultural heritage from sub-Saharan Africa is held by Western collections. That's quite daunting when trying to nail down what to include in Relooted, though Myres says the studio's narrative director Mohale Mashigo settled on the focus of 'thrones not teacups': "We wanted to have artifacts in the game that when you engage with them, it was interesting to learn about the history and culture, but leave you with this lingering feeling that this shouldn't be just in some museum."
There's a noble premise to Relooted then, but it was also important to make the game itself fun to play, with the flow and execution of a heist montage, something Myres admits the team struggled with for some time.
"Most heist games have some component of violence because violence is really easy to design, but the best heist movies are about outsmarting the security systems, and the other problem in heist movies is the viewer never knows the plan until the end, but you can't have hidden information from a player in a game because they need to rely on it to make decisions," he explains.
Fortunately, the solution came along with the release of another indie hit, Teardown, which, while known for its voxel-based destruction, was also a very robust heist game. "I was like, 'My god, they figured it out.' So we lifted the gameplay loop wholesale from Teardown but put it in the 2.5D perspective and added characters."
The Black Panther effect
A key aesthetic inspiration had come from the 2018 movie Black Panther, which really brought Afrofuturism to the mainstream, although Myres is keen to point out that Relooted's aesthetic is Africanfuturism.
"Africanfuturism is set in the future and tries to have real places, real people, and cultures - it's about the centering of the continent," he explains. "Like the team's hideout, I can literally see the building out the window; it's inspired by a real building in Johannesburg, and the museum where they return all artifacts at the end of the game is a real place in Senegal."
Whereas the MCU movie may have mostly relied on the Kilmonger cut, Relooted's cast offers a diverse portrayal of African identities, from haircuts to skin tones to accents. That was also a reason behind making the game in Unreal, because even though it's quite stylised, Myres praises the engine's beautiful renderer for not just being able to replicate the real African artifacts "in excruciating detail" but also for making the characters look as good as possible when rendered in real-time cinematics. Conversely, the game deliberately represents the Western locations you steal from as generic and amorphous, essentially reverse-parodying what Western media often does to Africa.
There was also a further benefit to using Unreal Engine, as much of the game had been made in Blueprints before being eventually reprogrammed in C++. "It helped our audio team, who were able to implement a lot of things themselves, and we have a great composer and sound designer who was able to save weeks and months of programming time by doing visual scripting implementation of the audio," Myres says. "It also helps the artists for doing little scripts and creating new materials. Unreal helps non-programmers a lot while maybe making programmers and game designers' lives slightly more difficult, but that's only if you don't know the engine."
Relooted launches on 10 February for PC and Xbox Series X/S. A Steam demo is also available.
