At the 2025 Game Devs of Color Expo, Sweet Baby Inc. team member Tristan J. Tarwater gave a talk called “Decolonizing Cozy Games.” What unfolded was a startling presentation where even farming, families, and the four seasons themselves were framed as symptoms of colonialism.
This was uncovered by MasterOfTheTDS and Writing Raven of the Gothic Therapy YouTube channel.
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One of the opening slides attempted to redefine the genre’s foundations.
“Decolonization: Often framed as an undoing of colonial influences and structures, it is also a creative process of imagining what cultures would look like if not disrupted by the exploitation of colonialism,” it said.
A slide presented by a Sweet Baby Inc. team member about Colonization in Cozy games – X, @MasterOfTheTDS
“Decoloniality/Decolonialidad: The process/practice of rejecting Euro-centric ways of knowing and being. Coined by Aníbal Quijano, this concept acknowledges how different concepts of the cosmos influenced knowledge acquisition, information storage and transfer, and ideas of the self.”
Two days ago, Tristan J. Tarwater of Sweet Baby Inc. gave a talk called “Decolonizing Cozy Games.”
Here’s what Sweet Baby Inc. people are teaching about cozy games:
Farming, families, even the four seasons are framed as colonial baggage.
One slide literally says there are “so… pic.twitter.com/uB44yNr7dY
— MasteroftheTDS (@MasteroftheTDS) September 21, 2025
In other words, the designers weren’t talking about just tweaking mechanics — they were questioning the very cultural foundations that cozy games typically draw from.
Cozy Games as “Colonial”
One slide, bluntly titled “Colonialism? In Cozy Games? Where?” spelled out what Tarwater sees as problems in the genre.
A slide presented by a Sweet Baby Inc. team member about Colonization in Cozy games with a checklist that includes “So Many White People” – X, @MasterOfTheTDS
The so-called “issues” include:
- “So Many White People”
- “The Outside Individual Who Saves the Day”
- “The Land is There for the Taking”
- “Corn and Wheat Make Number Go Up”
- “Nuclear Family/Two Gen Family”
- “Monochronic Structures, 4 Seasons, Gregorian Calendar”
- “Conveniently Ancient Civilizations”
- “Spirituality is Silly”
- “Straight Up Racism”
That’s right — even farming staples like corn and wheat, or the concept of a two-parent household where the parents are a man and a woman, were presented as vestiges of colonial influence and thus deemed a problematic element of Cozy games by Sweet Baby Inc.
The Push to “Decolonize”
Another slide asked: “How can we decolonize cozy games?”
A slide presented by a Sweet Baby Inc. team member about how to decolonize Cozy games – X, @MasterOfTheTDS
The proposed “solutions” boiled down to developers interrogating their own design choices:
- “What does safety mean for the audience we are trying to reach?”
- “What mechanics, rewards, cultural touchstones, and character (archetypes) will we implement that will resonate with them?”
- “What is the relationship of the player character to the NPC community and how can we handle this mechanically and narratively?”
- “How many generations of people are present at any time?”
- “How is time measured and how does this play out mechanically and narratively?”
Yes, even time itself — how a game measures seasons or years — was flagged as a potential area of colonial baggage. You really can’t make this stuff up…
Promoting Their Own Work
The presentation closed with a slide titled “Games to Check Out.” Among the titles listed were Fields of Mistria and Saltsea Chronicles — but also Tales of the Shire, a game Sweet Baby Inc. directly worked on.
A slide presented by a Sweet Baby Inc. team member about Colonization in Cozy games where they recommend their own game – X, @MasterOfTheTDS
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By holding up their own contracted project as the model for “decolonized” cozy games, SBI’s talk doubled as a commercial — positioning themselves as the arbiters of what counts as “acceptable” design moving forward.
The Bigger Picture
The session, uncovered by MasterOfTheTDS and Writing Raven of Gothic Therapy shows exactly how Sweet Baby Inc. is training the industry. They’re telling developers that cozy games filled with farming, families, and seasonal cycles are racist colonial relics that must be reworked. One slide literally reduced the issue to “So Many White People.”
A slide presented by a Sweet Baby Inc. team member about Colonization in Cozy games – X, @MasterOfTheTDS
It’s less about player escapism and more about ideological policing. And the recommended fix just so happens to run straight through games that Sweet Baby Inc. itself has a hand in shaping. This recommendation comes at a time in which Sweet Baby Inc. games like South of Midnight are tanking with gamers.
If this is the vision Sweet Baby Inc. is pushing, the future of cozy games may look far less cozy and far more like an exercise in box-checking.
How do you feel about Sweet Baby Inc. claiming cozy games are colonialism? Sound off in the comments and let us know!
I’m not one for cozy games but who the hell are they to decide this?
I’d bet money that they eat food that’s been farmed.
Farming promotes colonialism? How are people and bunnies supposed to eat?!
No target is too small or innocent for the leftist lunatics.
I want to decolonize Sweet Baby Inc from games.
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