LOOK: SA gaming studio releases new 'Tomb Raider'-style game
What do you get when you combine adventure, elaborate heists and Robin Hood-style thieves?
Nyamakop is a game studio located in Johannesburg, South Africa.
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The team at Nyamakop is a diverse and inclusive group that focuses on creating African-inspired PC and console games.
While their team is predominantly South African, they also employ people from across the continent.
They have already released one game, 'Semblance', a puzzle platformer in which you are encouraged to create and reshape your world.
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Now they are ready to release their next project, 'Relooted', which they unveiled at the annual Summer Game Fest in Los Angeles.
The aim of the game is simple.
Break into museums, steal ill-begotten African artefacts and return them to their rightful homes.
'Relooted' is a side-scrolling puzzle platformer. The objective is to move from one point to another by jumping, climbing, or flying across screens.
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The game has already been to the early versions of 'Tomb Raider' and 'Prince of Persia', but with its unique spin.
Here is a synopsis of the game according to Nyamakop:
Near the end of the 21st century, the political powers that be brokered a Transatlantic Returns Treaty, promising the repatriation of African artifacts from museums. Good old fashioned diplomacy was working — until it wasn’t. An amendment switched up the terms and conditions of which objects were to be returned. Museums, now knowing that only publicly displayed artifacts would be given back, were slowly removing artifacts from public display.
This is where the player comes in.
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As the player, it is your job to scope out the facility, construct an exit route, and steal the artefact before making your great escape.
Ben Myres, the creative director of 'Relooted', revealed in an interview that all the pieces in the game are based on real-world pieces in Western museums.
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The developer team spent two years researching and narrowing down the list of hundreds of pieces still held in Western museums into something more manageable to craft the various missions.
Myres used the Ngadji drum as an example.
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The Ngadji drum is a wooden drum made by the Pokomo people in Kenya. It was said that the Ngadji was used to call the community to attention when it was time to worship or to ring in the new reign of a king.
It was "confiscated" by the British in 1902 and has since been padlocked in a metal case in the large specimens storeroom of the British Museum’s Archive in London, England.
Kenyan researchers have made several efforts for the piece to be returned without any success.
We looked for artifacts with great stories in terms of how they were looted. Why were they important to people? Just anything associated with them. The first Kenyan people to see it in the last 100 years were in the 2010s. The person who saw the drum was a descendant of the king it was taken from originally. So these aren’t artifacts that were just found in the dust and excavated by archaeologists. These were still active cultures.
Each artefact in the game was faithfully rendered into a 3D model based on available photos and scans.
This proved challenging as many artefacts are inaccessible and have been in store for a long time.
The game does not have a release date yet, but you can watch the trailer below:
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Main image courtesy of IGN/YouTube