Relooted Turns African Artifact Repatriation into the Smartest 2D Heist Game on Xbox Game Pass

Relooted is the rare heist game that cares less about mowing down guards and more about making you feel like the mastermind behind a perfectly executed museum caper, as highlighted in Xbox Wire’s latest blog post. Instead of trying to be another gritty crime epic, Nyamakop’s Africanfuturist puzzler reframes the heist as a precision‑timed escape montage and turns the question “Who owns history?” into its core gameplay loop.

A heist about taking history back

As we previously covered, Relooted is set near the end of the 21st century, after a Transatlantic Returns Treaty promised to send looted African artifacts back from Western museums — only for a last‑minute amendment to gut the deal. Faced with institutions quietly pulling priceless objects off public display to dodge repatriation, your crew embraces a different kind of diplomacy: breaking in, grabbing the artifacts, and returning them to the people they were taken from.

You control Nomali, the de facto mastermind of a growing team of everyday Africans rather than hardened criminals. Your crewmates range from hackers and locksmiths to a “prim and proper grandma” who’s far more capable than she first appears, all bringing unique abilities to your plans. Across the campaign, you’re tasked with reclaiming 70 real‑world artifacts — all based on objects of major cultural, historical, or spiritual significance, and all viewable in‑game once you’ve pulled off the heist.

Nyamakop pitches it as “Africanfuturist heist,” with a hideout in a future Johannesburg and museums designed as fictional, puzzle‑dense spaces rather than literal recreations of specific Western institutions. The result is a game that doubles as both a tense series of stealthy break‑ins and a digital museum, offering short lore snippets and a sense of context around each reclaimed piece.

Three‑phase heists: casing, planning, escape

What makes Relooted stand out structurally is its commitment to the heist montage as a playable loop rather than a cutscene. Each mission is built around three distinct phases that together turn every level into a long, layered puzzle you solve in your head before you ever touch the artifact.

1. Case the joint
   In the first phase, you explore the museum after hours, mapping out doors, shutters, windows, pressure plates, and guard routes. This is where you experiment with moving props, scouting ventilation shafts, or identifying spots where a grappling point or improvised barricade could save you precious seconds once the alarms are blaring.

2. Lock in the plan
   Once you understand the layout, you assign crew members to specific tasks and positions. Maybe you position a hacker near a security hub to loop cameras, or tell a partner to grapple you up to a balcony at a key moment, or set grandma up to “accidentally” block a security shutter from fully closing. Each of these choices is simple on its own, but they stack into a complex chain of dependencies.

3. Hit the artifact and run
   The final phase begins the moment you pluck the artifact from its display. An alarm sounds, a countdown timer starts, and Nomali’s flow‑based parkour takes over as you sprint, slide, wall‑run, and dive through the route you meticulously prepared. If everything works, it feels like being dropped into the climactic montage of a heist movie you choreographed yourself; if not, every missed jump or misplaced teammate becomes a harsh lesson for your next attempt.

Nyamakop leans on a bit of cognitive science here: the team talks about how the human brain can only juggle roughly seven items at a time, so each micro‑puzzle in Relooted stays relatively simple. The trick — and the tension — comes from having to solve and execute five to fifteen of those micro‑puzzles in a single, uninterrupted escape run.

Puzzle game first, parkour rush second

Under the hood, Relooted is a 2D puzzle‑platformer where planning and execution are weighted almost evenly. During the slower casing and setup phases, you’re in pure puzzle mode, thinking about line‑of‑sight, trigger sequences, and how to transform a hostile space into a flowing route. Once the artifact is in your hands, the game shifts gears into a smooth, momentum‑driven action segment.

Previews highlight how Nomali’s movement is designed to feel almost automatic once you’ve learned the basics: holding a trigger keeps her sprinting and parkouring through the environment, with button taps giving bursts of extra speed. You’re chaining wall runs, slides under closing shutters, and vaults over obstacles while trying to remember every tiny adjustment you plotted during the planning phase.

Crucially, Relooted remains non‑violent throughout — guards are things to avoid, misdirect, or out‑maneuver, not enemies to knock out. That design choice pushes the game closer to the feel of something like Ocean’s Eleven or a tightly edited heist montage than a typical shooter, and it reinforces the theme that this is about reclaiming stolen history rather than committing random crime.

An Africanfuturist crew and a living hideout

Outside individual missions, your crew and hideout anchor the story. Between heists, you return to a base in a future‑imagined Johannesburg, where reclaimed artifacts are displayed alongside short descriptions that hint at their real‑world origins and significance.

You also expand your roster over time, recruiting specialists from different African countries, each voiced and written to feel grounded in real accents and cultures. Press materials and interviews emphasize that Nyamakop spent significant effort making the crew feel authentic, from a West African acrobat with a distinct Francophone accent to more everyday professionals whose skillsets happen to map perfectly onto museum heists.

It’s here that Relooted most clearly blurs the line between game and commentary: every successful job adds another reclaimed object to your home‑base museum and another story about how it was taken — and why it matters that you got it back.

Release timing and Game Pass details

Relooted is launching on February 10, 2026 for Xbox Series X|S and PC, with a day‑one slot included in Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass plans.news.instant-gaming+3 A demo has been available on Xbox since late 2025, giving early players a taste of the planning‑then‑panic loop that defines its best missions.

For Game Pass subscribers, that means Relooted lands in a busy February window alongside other high‑profile releases, but it fills a very specific niche: a stylish, non‑violent, story‑driven heist game that also doubles as a quiet argument for where African artifacts belong. With 70 missions’ worth of repatriation puzzles, a crew of sharply written characters, and a structure that turns every escape into a bespoke montage, it’s positioned as one of the more distinctive new indies in Xbox’s early‑2026 lineup.

Get Relooted on Xbox Series X|S and PC