Relooted has been a big surprise for me. Trailers for the game seemed to advertise the sidescroller as a parkour-driven platformer game, but after playing it, I realized that it’s first and foremost a heist game. While nabbing your prize and skillfully maneuvering through obstacles to reach the goal as fast as possible is a core part of the gameplay loop, the far more important component is the actual planning and setup stage that occurs beforehand, where you take on the role of a crew’s mastermind and plan out every step of the heist.
Set at the end of the 21st century, Relooted sees you play as Nomali, who puts her intelligence and acrobatic prowess to good use when she gets roped into heading up a crew of everyday citizens turned thieves. The crew plans on breaking into museums and mansions across the West to steal back the African artifacts locked away in vaults. Not for personal gain, of course, but to return them to where they rightfully belong.
Each mission begins with you mapping out the target, identifying which doors will lock when the alarms sound, which windows you can break through, where a zipline can be placed, and other aspects of the heist. During this planning stage, you can move certain objects too, like tables that can be placed to keep a door from fully closing, or put into a spot to act as a vault to reach otherwise unreachable ledges. Once you take the artifact, the alarms will sound and you’ll have only a few seconds to make your getaway. Your job is to prepare enough so that the parkour challenge in front of you is quick and doable, and most missions don’t have a singular solution.
From what I’ve played, it makes for a fulfilling, puzzle-driven experience that rewards you for experimenting and trying to solve a heist in your own way. I really enjoyed the half-hour of the game I’ve played, falling in love with Relooted’s setting, characters, and gameplay loop. It’s currently one of my most anticipated games of 2025, largely for how good it felt to see my well-laid plans culminate in perfect escapes or adaptation in the moment resulting in nail-biting close calls.
Ahead of Relooted’s release, I spoke with a few members of South African studio Nyamakop to discuss the game’s futuristic African setting, development, and heist-driven gameplay. The game is set to launch for Xbox Series X|S and PC–it doesn’t yet have a firm release date.
GameSpot: While the Afrofuturism setting has a decent foothold in pop culture, a futuristic Africa doesn’t. Where does the team start from when crafting this world and these characters, and how do you avoid just using Afrofuturism themes and tropes?
Creative Director Ben Myres: So on the visual design side of the stuff, [narrative director Mohale Mashigo], me, and Bongane [Mahlangu], our art director and our concept artist, used to have some very intense battles and fights over how the character should look. Because there are some references, but there aren’t a lot. You have to basically know concept artists on the continent that are imagining future Africa and just be able to find them on Pinterest and stuff. But there’s this tension between how ritualistic you want the characters to look.
You also need to consider the functionality of the outfits. They are running and doing a heist at the end of the day. So it needs to be functional but maybe not too functional–it still needs to be cool. And then you also need to [consider] how far in the future [the game is]. How futurist can we make it as well? Is it completely alien? But if you do that, then some of the African and local place references become harder to spot for the people who know them and see them.
Mohale Mashigo: Some inspiration also came from contemporary African designers.
In terms of the makeup of the team, are y’all all in this same location?
Producer Sithe Ncube: A lot of people are based in Johannesburg. Some people are based in Cape Town, but we also have people [elsewhere], like a 3D artist in Ethiopia. But even among the people who are working on the game, there are people [of] different backgrounds. I’m originally from Zambia. When I started on this, I was living in Port Elizabeth and now I’m in Johannesburg. We also had people work on the game from Ghana [and] Nigeria. And the voice actors are also from [all over]. They have different backgrounds as well, all of which are pretty close to the backgrounds of the actual characters.
For me personally, even before I started working on this project, I’ve been very interested in what people are doing in other parts of Africa in terms of game development.
I’m always very curious to know about them [and] how [their heritage and background] actually lends itself to the game. Because there are some instances where it’s like, maybe we need a pronunciation for this type of thing. And you can ask someone who’s very close with someone in the team or even just someone within the team.
Even the environment art [is affected]. Someone told me that they really like the rooftops in our game and I was like, “What?” I’ve literally never heard anyone comment on rooftops, but they said, “Yeah, you can see that it’s purposely African. It’s good.”
I love that though! I love that there’s just someone out there that’s like, “You know Relooted? You know that game? Awesome African rooftops. Peak authenticity when it comes to rooftops.” Speaking of the rooftops–you spend a lot of time running along them as you plan stuff out. Does the game ever put limits on that planning stage, like the amount of time you can take?
Myres: I think we thought about doing it at some point. I think we might’ve even had versions where we tried it out, but what we’re looking at is trying to essentially adapt the heist filmic structure to a game. And to do that you almost have to focus on just one part of the structure because of just the way games work. And the part we really wanted to focus on recreating was being in a heist montage from a heist film and usually in films you as the viewer don’t know the plan until the end and you watch them go through the plan, but in games you can’t necessarily do that. You can’t have all this hidden information from the player.
So we had to focus on allowing the player to figure out the plan so that when they’re executing it, they understand what they’ve been doing. So as a result, we realized that putting that time pressure there might weaken that aspect of it because you won’t understand the plan as well. And there are often some pretty hard levels where if you’ve missed a certain step in at least the core path, there aren’t a lot of ways out. So we tested that idea [of a time limit], but it just ended up ruining the sort of rewarding feeling that you get when you’re executing and flowing through a plan that you’ve made up yourself. You feel like a genius, like, “Damn, this is my plan.”
When it comes to heist games, I think there’s this almost innate draw to add new tricks and tools so missions can grow increasingly complex. When it comes to Relooted, when do you stop gaining new tools? And does the game hit a sort of stable level of complexity when that happens?
Mashigo: So each team member is essentially the tool that you need and you have to [recruit them]. In the story, you’ll see that, “Okay, I probably can’t use the locksmith Trevor only by himself,” and then narratively, it’ll be like, “Well, you need to go find somebody else,” and you acquire [each member] slowly, but eventually you learn how to use the team better. As the levels get bigger, [you begin to realize that] they can’t be everywhere. They’re only human. They’re not magical. And then you have to decide, “I have to put him here because I think I can go through there and maybe she’ll be there.” And so your tools are your team actually, so you feel like you’re working with people.
Myres: I’m trying to think when does that end exactly? When does Lusa join the team?
Mashigo: It ends in the beginning of Chapter 6. That’s when she joins.
Myres: Yeah, so it’s like the beginning of Chapter 6 of the eight chapters [when] you get the last crew member and then there are some absurd or at least one very absurd level that you have to play [after that]. It’s quite complicated. So it does get more complicated, but I think it almost asks you to be more tactical and there’s one level towards that [point], somewhere in those chapters that is very elaborate and complex.
Mashigo: It’s a monster.
Myres: The demo you played is very compressed because we wanted people to be able to see the best part of the game in a shorter period of time, but it takes quite a while to build up to that in the actual game because there’s so many small, tiny mechanics that you have to understand in order to execute a heist fully. But the game is actually quite a slow burn of increasing complexity–at least until chapter six. And then at some point between Chapter 6 and Chapter 8, we just throw [in a monster level].
This interview was edited for both brevity and readability.
