Heist game Relooted gets a release date

The intriguing Africanfuturist heist game, Relooted, is out on February 10. Developed by independent South African studio Nyamakop, the game focuses on a ragtag crew from Johannesburg that liberates real-life African artifacts from a series of fictionalized Western museums.

 is best described as a 2.5d side-scrolling action platformer with stealth and puzzle elements. You have to carefully plan each heist with your fellow teammates, knowing where to place each crew member and how you’re going to get in and out in one piece. Once you’ve grabbed the artifact you’re looking for in each mission, an alarm will sound and you have a limited amount of time to escape, so good preparation is vital.

The studio’s previous game, the platformer Semblance, was significant for being the first South Africa-developed IP to come to a Nintendo console when it launched on Switch in 2018. At E3 that same year, Nyamakop programmer Cukia Kimani and designer Ben Myres talked to about the difficulties of getting your game in front of the major platform-holders as an indie developer based in sub-Saharan Africa. Without notable local industry events or reps in the country, the developers had to do a lot of globe-trotting in order to get their game noticed.

At the time of writing there’s no Switch or Switch 2 release lined up for Relooted, but the game is coming to PC and Xbox consoles next month.