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On July 23, 2026, Yangyang Mobile will be releasing its confectionery dating sim High Times to the world. This title is a new game in what I have begun to affectionately refer to as the barista sub-genre of Visual Novels, games where the player’s primary method of interacting with the world and characters is via serving drinks or food. In High Time’s case, the player will be serving donuts at a confectionery called the Hotbox to the many customers who visit the store daily, as you listen to various stories unfold and maybe find love in the process. Is this game worth playing, or should gamers visit a different confectionery? Let’s dissect the game piece by piece and make the decision for ourselves.
Simple Cooking Mechanics
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.
Complex Route Design
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.
A Shocking Large Story
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.
Sincerely Sexual
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.
If you are looking for a safely written cozy experience with this game, then you’ll have to look elsewhere. High Times is a game that fully embraces the idea that people can be horny and healthily talk about their kinks with friends. Sex is a very common topic of conversation that is brought up at least twice per in-game week, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
While many recent dating sims or western VNs either pull their punches with character designs and dialogue or look down upon the genre as a whole, judging how sexual a lot of titans of the genre can be, High Times takes a different approach. This is a very horny game, and it is comfortable with that.
Plenty of these characters, both men and women, are very open about showing off their bodies and talking about how attracted they are to other characters and you, the player. Even Lucy, the character with the most “innocent” looking design, talks about ejaculation and the dynamics of omegaverse writing within her introduction scene.
Breastfeeding, inflation, and urolagnia are just a handful of different fetishes that the characters mention during casual conversation. The way the characters talk is less like how one would expect people to act in a public confectionery and more like how a Discord group chat speaks.
The Hotbox isn’t a place to feel ashamed. There is no judgement here; it’s a place where you can eat donuts and talk about what makes you you with other people as the friendly barista serves you exactly what you need in order to get those feelings across.
While the game’s overtly horny nature may be a turn-off for some folks, I personally find it to be a breath of fresh air after playing recent similar barista games which seemingly strived to be as safe as possible and avoid these topics aside from the vague allusion to adults engaging in intercourse.
Visual and Technical Issues
To close off this review, let’s spend some time speaking about the visuals of High Times. If I were to describe the characters of this title in a word, it would be vibrant.
Every character in this game (except for Connor) is bombastic and wears their heart on their sleeve. Within a few seconds of meeting a character, you’ll have a good grasp of what type of person they are. This extends to the character designs, which are all very colorful and reflect the loud personalities of the cast.
As for the art and illustrations portraying those designs, I would say that was close to perfect. Every character’s design was both very distinct and perfectly gets their personality across at just a glance. While some of the illustrations can look a bit strange whenever they need to bounce after the player gives them the correct order, it all fits with the style the game is trying to portray.
There are times, however, when the sprites and art of the game feel held back by the basic structure. Because the protagonist is always behind the bar counter, the player will be looking at the same part of their screen as characters make the same expressions every day in a way that can get very repetitive during long play sessions.
While the game will occasionally break up this monotony via some CGs, these are a very rare treat. I wish the game had more of these illustrations to break up the visuals and add more variety to the game, but what is here is plenty serviceable.
As the game’s primary focus is on story, I do find it important to bring up how the game is not completely flawless in the typos department. While rare, the player will come across the occasional misspelled word, capitalization in the wrong places, or notes indicating that a word is supposed to be indented when it isn’t.
The worst of this comes from a very bad text mistake on several characters’ profiles in the early game, where I got stuck trying to figure out how to progress her character arc, as instead of the proper instructions being displayed, the game only showed me a generic text string. This became a negligible issue after I bought everything, but it was still very annoying at the moment.
Another technical issue I had came from the game’s voice acting. Despite High Times being a fully voiced game, there were several oddly silent scenes; Billie’s scenes in particular went silent more than others, which was a massive shame.
I may have had some issues with the game’s visuals and experienced some technical issues during my playthrough, but they didn’t fully detract from my experience with the game.
Closing Thoughts
Overall, I find it difficult to put into words how shocked I was with my High Times playthrough. Despite playing both demos for the game and following it for around a year now, I was still caught off guard by the game’s long length, in-depth route mechanics, and the game’s refreshingly open nature when it comes to discussing sexual topics. If you are a fan of the barista subgenre of game or someone who wants to try out a really good Dating Sim, then I would heavily recommend giving High Times a try.
High Times Review – Baked to Brilliance
Bottom Line
High Times is a game that will shock the player at every turn. Whether that be from making them double take at how many hours they've sunk into a single playthrough or by making them spit-take when a character says something unexpected, there is no way to safely predict what the game will do next. The actual cooking mechanics of the game are simple to the point of being repetitive, but the visual novel and dating simulator side of the game is well written and engaging enough to make up for that repetition. Fans of this style of game who want a bit more edge in the writing than what most cozy games provide should definitely check out this title
