A new video game allows players to reclaim artifacts from Western museums that colonialists plundered from Africa.
Relooted, created by South African gaming studio Nyamakop, is different from many heist games: The stakes are not defined by money or physical danger, but by the ever-changing goalposts of an imagined — and loophole-ridden — “Transatlantic Returns Treaty,” which makes it increasingly difficult for the characters to steal the more than 70 cultural objects hidden within the game.
“Relooted illustrates the full breadth and scale of colonial plundering endured by African peoples that’s so often rendered through generalization or abstraction,” one reviewer wrote for PC Gamer. “But even as it recounts the depravities and depredations of the continent’s colonial history, Relooted is anything but a bummer. It’s refreshingly bright.”