Relooted Review | Culture Behind Glass: Stealing The Stolen

Relooted asks a question most games are too timid to touch: what if someone just took back what was stolen?

Developed by South African studio Nyamakop, Relooted is a 2D puzzle-platformer heist game where you play as Nomali, a parkour expert recruited by her family to reclaim real African artifacts from Western museums. These aren't fictional treasures. The items you'll be "stealing" are actual objects currently sitting in European and American museums, thousands of miles from their homes. In Relooted's near-future setting, a repatriation treaty promised returns, but museums found loopholes. So Nomali's crew takes matters into their own hands.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf1i1-9_71Q

I need to address something upfront: there's been some genuinely ignorant hate directed at this game's story, and I'm not here for it. The premise is important, the representation matters, and the care Nyamakop put into showcasing these artifacts deserves recognition. What I'm critiquing is the technical execution and gameplay structure, not the concept itself.

What struck me first about Relooted wasn't the heists themselves, but how much care Nyamakop put into making me understand why these artifacts matter. Before each mission, the game introduces the objects you'll be stealing with historical context about their significance and, often, the circumstances of their theft. It's Ocean's Eleven meets Black Panther for the nerds. There are even optional scannables throughout levels that teach you about African achievements and cultures. These museum-style breakdowns are genuinely fascinating, and I found myself actively seeking them out. Well, minus the few times I accidentally stumbled upon them while alarms were blaring. These aren't empty collectibles; they're the entire point, and Relooted never lets you forget that.

The heists split into two phases: scouting and execution. Early on, I unlocked Nu-Nu, a scanning drone that locates targets, obstacles, and artifacts. This is where Relooted found its rhythm for me. There's something deeply satisfying about methodically revealing an entire building, piece by piece, understanding the puzzle before you even set foot inside. It's easy to feel like a master escape artist when you have recon support and escape routes plotted in advance.

Once you're inside, Relooted enters a flow state that feels genuinely good when everything clicks. But here's the thing about heist games: they live and die on planning, and Relooted makes you constantly second-guess whether you planned correctly. You'll call on teammates like Trevor, your overconfident kid brother with a robotic arm who can hack doors and crack safes, or Ndede, an acrobat who sets up ziplines to traverse massive gaps and shatter reinforced glass. Each crew member has a specific skill, and you assign them to access points during the casing phase. The puzzles themselves are simple (move this table onto that button, position Trevor here to hack that door), but that simplicity keeps you moving instead of stopping to scratch your head for five minutes.

What makes this interesting is the nagging doubt that creeps in mid-heist. I'd be three rooms deep and suddenly pause: “Wait, did I position Trevor correctly? Did I pick the right escape route?” The game lets you zoom out to assess the full layout, but that also reveals just how many paths you could have taken. When you place Trevor to hack a door on the west side, but your escape route goes east, that mistake doesn't reveal itself until the alarm triggers and you're sprinting in the wrong direction.

The escape sequences are where Relooted absolutely shines. Once you grab that protected artifact and the alarm triggers, the screen pulses red, doors start closing, and you're off. I'd jump through windows, swing from hanging rings, dive over balconies, slide down rooftops, use ziplines, wall-jump between narrow passages, all while security drones chase me and the timer counts down. When I nailed an escape without a single mistake, my crew positioning was perfect, and every speed boost landed exactly right; it felt incredible. These moments are genuinely thrilling and easily the best part of the game.

Here's where things get tricky, though. Relooted suffers from what I can only describe as a "Groundhog Day" problem. The heist structure (case the joint, solve the puzzle, grab the artifact, escape) is basically the same every single mission. By the fourth or fifth heist, I found myself going through the motions more than genuinely engaging with the challenge. The game includes optional objectives like timed speed boosts and hidden artifacts to encourage replayability, which I appreciate, but it doesn't address the fundamental issue: the loop itself starts to feel like rinse and repeat.

What made this worse is that Relooted feels like it's in a perpetual tutorial phase. Every time you unlock a new character, you're forced to complete a tutorial version of a heist that walks you through their specific abilities. It absolutely kills the game's momentum. By the time I recruited my third teammate, I just wanted to execute heists at full speed, and instead, the game tends to hold the players' hands. The game structure starts to feel less like a polished experience and more like an extended demo that never quite graduates to the main event.

I have to talk about the characters, because the relationship between Nomali and her brother Trevor is one of the most genuinely alive parts of this game. Trevor is overconfident, reckless, always making jokes at the wrong time, and constantly butting heads with Nomali about the ethics of what they're doing. When Nomali gets exasperated with Trevor's antics, I feel that exasperation in my bones. I have siblings. I know that specific flavor of “I love you, but you're driving me insane.” The game doesn't give Trevor a redemption arc. He stays annoying. That's refreshing, actually, because not everyone needs character growth to feel authentic.

The rest of the crew fills fairly standard archetypes (Fred is the serious tech expert, Professor Grace is the idealistic elder), but they're all likable enough. The historical lore surrounding the artifacts adds depth for players who care about world-building, and learning about these objects gave me genuine appreciation for the cultures they represent.

But the dialogue system fights against good writing. During conversations, you get a rotating camera that swings around the characters as they talk, and it's genuinely annoying. The camera pulses and shifts in a way that made me feel slightly motion-sick. Worse, you're presented with dialogue choices during conversations, but after you pick one, the same options reappear. These choices don't seem to impact the story or relationships at all, so there's no incentive to explore every option, especially when the voice acting during gameplay sequences feels stilted and takes away from my virtual zoomies.

The voice acting quality is split right down the middle. The proper cutscenes, the animated sequences that play between missions, are genuinely good. The performances feel warm, natural, connected. But during in-game dialogue and gameplay moments, that quality drops noticeably. Lines feel read rather than performed, like each actor recorded separately without hearing the other person's delivery.

On the audio front, the soundtrack is genuinely fantastic. The ambient music perfectly captures the tension of casing a museum and the adrenaline rush of escape sequences. Unfortunately, the sound effects don't maintain that quality. Relooted reuses the same sound assets over and over. When you're hearing the identical door-opening noise for the fifteenth time in a single heist, it starts to make the world feel static and lifeless.

I also ran into technical issues that became harder to ignore as the game progressed. Relooted is locked to 60 FPS with no option to unlock it, which isn't necessarily a dealbreaker, but it feels arbitrary. More frustrating is the optimization, or lack thereof. Whether I set my graphics to low or high, the game consumed roughly the same amount of system resources without any noticeable visual improvement. Even at maximum settings, character models lack polish, and for a time, I firmly believed characters just don't blink. When they do, it's so infrequent that it creates this uncanny valley effect where everyone looks vaguely lifeless.

The animation quality is inconsistent, too. While the core movement feels great, the animations themselves lack proper buffering. There's a stiffness to transitions between actions that don't break the game but pull away from the sense of immersion. During fast escapes, I'd notice weird pop-ins that felt really odd, as I just had Nu-Nu showcase every single room. Nothing to put too much stock into if fixed with a patch update.

Relooted feels less like a finished product and more like a promising demo that needed another year in development. The core movement mechanics work, the Nu-Nu casing gameplay is genuinely engaging, and the escape sequences deliver those thrilling moments a heist game should. But the repetitive mission structure, the perpetual tutorial feel, and the technical issues all add up to an experience that's harder to recommend than I wish it was. I respect what Nyamakop set out to do here. The premise matters, the representation matters, and the care they put into showcasing these artifacts matters. I just wish the game surrounding those elements had received the same level of polish and attention. This is a game I want to love more than I actually do, and that's the most frustrating feeling of all.

Breakdown

Game Name: Relooted

Developer: Nyamakop

Publisher: Nyamakop

Platforms: Nyamakop

Game Length: PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, Xbox Play Anywhere/Gamepass

Accessibility: Four difficulty levels (adjustable guard rails and hints)

Colorblind mode Subtitle size options

Final Thoughts

Relooted's premise is bold, necessary, and handled with genuine care by Nyamakop. The concept of repatriating real African artifacts through heist gameplay deserves celebration, and I want to be clear that my criticisms are aimed at execution, not concept. The Nu-Nu casing mechanics are engaging, the escape sequences deliver real thrills, and the Trevor/Nomali sibling dynamic feels authentically alive. However, the repetitive mission structure makes the game feel like an ongoing tutorial that never quite graduates to the main event, and technical issues like the 60 FPS lock, poor optimization, and inconsistent animation quality are hard to overlook. The reused sound effects and stilted in-game voice acting further detract from immersion. Relooted feels more like a promising extended demo than a polished final product, which is frustrating because the foundation (the movement, the casing, the artifacts themselves) deserves better. I respect what Nyamakop set out to do here, and I hope they get the chance to refine this concept, because there's something genuinely special buried underneath the technical roughness.

Key provided Mooncat Games. Reviewed on PC