High Times Review Guide – Dating Sim Mechanics

July 23, 2026 marks the launch of High Times, a confectionery-themed dating sim that stakes its reputation in the cozy barista sub-genre of Visual Novels. Players step behind the counter at the Hotbox, crafting mood-altering donuts while engaging with a diverse cast of customers. What elevates this title isn’t just the baking; it’s how your donut choices influence emotional connections and unlock romantic routes, making each decision meaningful in unexpected ways.

The core gameplay hinges on crafting mood-enhancing donuts to satisfy your customers at the Hotbox. These aren’t ordinary pastries; each donut you serve can sway a customer’s feelings, from happiness to focus or melancholy. This emotional dynamic adds layers to the straightforward act of baking, shifting the experience beyond simple cooking mechanics to something more engaging. When customers arrive, they might request a specific donut recipe, desire a particular emotional effect, or present a cryptic order that requires deciphering. This variety keeps you attentive and encourages experimentation within the minimalistic cooking system. Making donuts starts with kneading the dough through clicks, followed by a brief cooking period. After that, you apply glazes and toppings manually, which sometimes involves drawing shapes on the donuts to match particular recipes or whims. It’s a simple process on the surface but with nuanced implications tied to the characters’ moods. By allowing manual decoration, the game lets players express creativity while strategically aligning donut attributes with customer preferences. This small but vital mechanic introduces a satisfying tactile feel to the otherwise narrative-driven gameplay.

​The main concept of High Times is that you are a barista running a donut confectionery. However, the donuts you’re serving aren’t regular donuts but rather mood-enhancing donuts, which will make your customers feel specific emotions. Customers can become happy, sad, or even super focused depending on what you feed them.

​Whenever a customer enters the shop, they will naturally order a donut to eat. Sometimes characters will order a specific recipe that the player may or may not have; sometimes they’ll simply ask to feel a specific emotion; and other times they’ll give a complex yet vague order where the player must figure out exactly what to serve to them.

The process of making the donuts themselves is very simple. First, the player needs to knead the dough by clicking on it, wait about three seconds for the donut to cook, and then apply whatever glazes or toppings they want before serving it to the customer.

Whenever you make a donut, you’ll be able to manually apply the glaze, drizzle, and toppings yourself. Typically, this is done so you can draw specific shapes on the donut in order to fit your current recipe, but sometimes the game will give you the freedom to draw whatever you want on the dough.

The basic gameplay of High Times isn’t particularly complex and is intentionally simple, but that’s because it isn’t the star of the show. The real focus here is on the dating and the game’s various routes.

While baking is the game’s basis, the heart of High Times lies in its intricate dating sim structure. Progressing in character relationships demands more than mere ingredient selection; it requires attentive listening and careful dialogue responses as characters share their stories. Success comes from blending accurate donut orders with thoughtful conversational choices. However, the complexity deepens as you unlock new ingredients and store décor using money earned from sales and tips—a system that influences which customers frequent your shop and, by extension, which storylines you can pursue. This economic layer means you can strategically invest to attract certain customers and unlock particular narrative routes. For instance, acquiring cookie toppings may be essential to advance one character’s storyline, making ingredient management a subtle but significant part of your progress. Rather than strictly adhering to preset recipes, the game encourages you to interpret customer moods and customize donuts accordingly. When a character requests sweetness with two toppings, focusing on the intended emotion rather than the exact recipe often yields better results. Store decorations aren’t just cosmetic; they affect who visits your shop, transforming the player’s role into a savvy shopkeeper managing both atmosphere and clientele. This dynamic gives the dating sim elements more tactical weight than is typical in the genre. Rather than a static roster locked early on, customer visits evolve depending on your decisions, demanding ongoing investment and attention to see all character routes. This design addresses common complaints about dating sims feeling too linear or shallow by introducing resource management as a way to juggle relationships.

High Times might be a game about baking, but it’s also a Dating Sim, and that means the player is going to be putting in a lot of work to bond with the various customers who walk into their store.

The main method of growing close to other characters is, of course, cooking the correct orders for them and making the correct dialogue choices during a conversation as they pour their heart and backstory out to you. This is about what one would expect from this style of game, but things get a whole lot more complex once one takes High Times other gameplay systems into account.

As the player progresses through the game, they’ll be able to spend the money they earn from orders and tips on extra flavor types and toppings that will both unlock extra recipe types and allow them to progress through the game’s various routes. For example, you’ll be blocked from progressing one character’s story until you purchase cookie toppings for your donuts.

Whenever you buy a new glaze flavor or topping, the game will automatically add any recipes that involve that flavor to your recipe book. While this does mean the game has less experimentation than other Barista games like Coffee Talk, it instead allows the game to focus more on making the player read through the various recipe types and decide on which one is right for the current customer.

Now, one shouldn’t get too focused on following recipes to the book. While they can be helpful for figuring out what a customer wants, you shouldn’t be afraid to experiment. If Emmete is asking for something sweet with two different toppings, you should be focusing more on what type of mood she needs to be in rather than looking for a recipe that has those two ingredients.

Aside from purchasing extra ingredients for their donuts, the player can also spend money on various decor items for their store. These items aren’t mere decoration for the player, though, as each item will increase the probability of specific customers walking into your store.

Unlike other games in the barista sub-genre, who walks in on each day is not always determined after the first few weeks of gameplay. If the player wants to see more of a specific character, then they’re going to need to invest money toward seeing them.

As I was writing out this review, I scrolled through several posts on Social Media about how many recent games that advertise themselves as Dating Simulators don’t go beyond being digital choose-your-own-adventure books and don’t have stat mechanics or juggling relationships like a lot of genre greats.

High Times almost feels like an answer to that style of complaint as the player becomes determined to climb out of the hole of constant Connor and Bredditor visits in order to spend time with the various characters they actually want walking into their store.

I think the game’s money, ingredient purchasing, and decor system are all great ways for High Times to have routes and traditional Dating Sim elements beyond simple choices.

If there is any complaint I have with the game’s story structure, it’s that I do wish money mattered more after the first few weeks. While there is a game over state if the player goes bankrupt, it’s very hard to actually run out of money.

Expect a sprawling narrative experience once you get into High Times . Each in-game day involves serving three customers, unraveling dialogue, and choosing your next steps in character arcs. This loop might seem repetitive at first glance, but the layered stories and multiple endings reward persistence and curiosity. Featuring roughly thirty customers and six main romance options, the game’s sheer volume of content can easily surpass fifty hours of playtime. Optional achievements further deepen the experience, offering targets for completionists looking to extract every ounce of content. Despite some repetitiveness in your daily duties, the compelling characters and evolving story hooks kept me clicking forward long past initial impressions. The gameplay loop balances familiarity with enough variation to sustain engagement through dozens of hours. Having completed a single route myself, my playtime hit around twenty hours with many endings and achievements left unexplored. This breadth will satisfy players seeking a rich and meaty visual novel experience beyond fleeting engagements. That said, your enjoyment ultimately hinges on how much you resonate with the game’s distinctive style of writing and humor—an acquired taste that might not sit well with everyone.

As the player goes through their daily routine of serving three customers a day, reading through the dialogue, and looking over what they need to do next to progress through that character’s story, they’ll slowly begin to realize that High Times is not a game that can be beaten within a few hours or a handful of play sessions like other barista games. Instead, the player will be in for a massive visual novel experience that can easily surpass fifty hours.

With around thirty different customers with their own stories to tell, multiple endings for the main six romanceable characters, and enough optional achievements to make any completionist’s head spin, High Times seeks to be more than just another game in this genre and is instead a complete exploration of every type of story that this game’s team could think of doing within this genre’s framework.

Part of me wants to criticize the game for being too repetitive, as the player will be doing the exact same thing every day for the entire runtime of the game, but every time I thought about writing this sentence down during my playthrough, I still found myself clicking the button to continue to the next day before I finished writing my thoughts. There is something addictive about this gameplay loop, and it kept me hooked throughout my entire playthrough.

I played through a single route of High Times for this review, and by the end of that singular route, my play time was twenty hours, with my achievement list and ending list still staring at me with loads of empty spaces. Anyone who loves this style of game and wants a very meaty experience will find themselves right at home with High Times.

Of course, that lengthy play time only matters if the experience is enjoyable from start to finish, and with a game like this, the enjoyment will all come down to the player’s taste in writing.

The writing in High Times possesses a uniquely candid and risqué style, embracing a tone that can be described as unabashedly bold. It’s clearly written by and for an audience comfortable with the eccentric and edgy. This candidness permeates character dialogue and narrative moments, adding layers of authenticity for those who appreciate such honesty. Players should be prepared for humor and storytelling that push boundaries and lean into the freaky and unusual. This approach to writing creates a distinctive flavor that sets the game apart from more vanilla dating sims, but it also means it may not be everyone’s cup of tea.

The humor and writing of High Times is an acquired taste, to say the least, one that I find difficult to describe in a professional manner, and as such, I’ll instead opt to describe it in a way that the game’s characters would: This is a game written for freaks, by freaks.