Relooted is a puzzle platformer heist game with a narrative about white western colonists stealing African artifacts over the past few centuries. It takes place in a near future sci-fi Africa and has you planning heists across the world. Your goal is to reclaim stolen artifacts and return them to Africa. The gameplay loop consists of assigning crew members to different spots along the heist, clearing out any obstacles in your path to the exit with deception and your crewmates, then finally grabbing the artifacts and racing to the exit.
The escape is where this game shines. Fast-paced movement, quick decision-making, and a very satisfying conclusion to each heist make it excel. The setup phases take up the majority of the missions, with many smaller puzzles that intersect along the path to the escape. The puzzles are rather simplistic overall; I blew right past most of them. I got stuck on a puzzle only due to missing a detail like a table in a different room. I passed it without thinking to bring it to the main puzzle area. For the most part, though, the puzzles satisfied me to complete. The puzzles about deceiving the robot guards were the easiest to cheese. The punishment for choosing the wrong dialogue option is simply being caught and sent back to your most recent save state. Meaning you could mostly brute force your way through the dialogue tree.
The voice acting and character designs are probably my favorite part of this game. The voice actors were perfectly cast and did a great job portraying the characters where the animation needed supplementing. The character designs capture the characters’ personalities perfectly while portraying interesting futuristic clothing with influences from traditional African designs and patterns.
The animation team did a great job animating the characters during the actual levels. Plus the mocap actors performed well during the cutscenes. However, they could have invested more budget into polishing the mocap and animating the conversations outside of the cutscenes. I would have preferred a system with 2D images of the characters that pop in and out of frame like Neon White uses, rather than the World of Warcraft-style preset animations with simple talk loops. They certainly could have done this, as they had nice-looking 2D drawings of the characters that they used for icons in the walkie-talkie conversations during the heist.
The story (without spoilers) is a twisty narrative about a new law. It gives museums an excuse to keep their collections of African artifacts and not return them to their rightful people. I feel it takes too long to introduce many of the characters, likely because the gameplay didn’t want to overwhelm players in the early game with characters and their mechanics. This meant that by the end, I didn’t have much of a connection with a large portion of the cast. I also wish the law had shown evidence of being onto the crew, forcing them to be more careful from outside forces and not just museum security. No one showed evidence of knowing what the crew was doing until halfway through the game.
The game needed some polish. I soft locked three times in the levels, twice due to clipping issues with the safe boxes and once due to clipping into a wall while exiting a crawl state. I also experienced a recurring animation error where I would be moving while locked in the pose of a phone call, though this didn’t hinder my experience. Honestly, it was very funny.
What is the Age Rating for Relooted?
Relooted carries an E10+ rating, and the game lives up to that classification. The most violent content in the game is a single punch, so parents need not worry about graphic violence. However, the subject matter deals with colonization, artifact repatriation, and cultural theft, which can get heavy. Parents should consider whether their children are ready to engage with these themes. The narrative explores serious historical and cultural issues.
How Hard is Relooted? Can Kids Play it?
The game presents an interesting difficulty curve for younger players. Relooted requires very little reading, making it accessible to children with varying literacy levels. However, the puzzles can be quite challenging and demand logical thinking. The platforming itself is not complex, but since the difficulty depends on how you set up your heist, the action sequences can become pretty wild and demanding, especially when things go wrong during an escape.
Overall, the game looks very nice and is fun to play. I would recommend it to anyone who feels the gaming industry lacks acknowledgment of African culture. I also feel this game is safe for family gaming. There is some violence, but it only extends to one punch and a kidnapping. This game has a good story, fun gameplay, amazing visuals, and important messages. It lets you feel cool with speedy parkour while doing cool stuff to make the world better.
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