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Yangyang Mobile’s confectionery dating sim High Times is right around the corner. The game currently has a public demo out on Steam, and I was also lucky enough to have received a code for a press demo, which showed off a different part of the game. As someone who loves visual novels and has recently enjoyed similar games where you play as a barista, I’ve decided to play through these demos and give my thoughts so you can decide if the game will be worth trying or not.
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.
I am very glad I had the chance to try out both the public demo of this game and the press demo, as it allowed me to get a good grasp on exactly what type of game High Times will be. Being able to experience both how the game will begin, with the player having access to next to no ingredients or recipes to slowly get used to the mechanics, and having access to something later, where I had access to every flavor and recipe, helped me understand all the mechanics of actually serving these donuts.
Looking through the recipe book and getting a good grasp on everything available to me, and having to make a decision based on a customer’s vague request, felt great. There are dozens upon dozens of different donut types that the player can make, and it’s up to you to decide which one will make the customer feel right.
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.
As for the process of making the donuts themselves, this requires slightly more player input than other games in what I have chosen to refer to as the barista sub-genre. Instead of just selecting which ingredients you’ll use, the player will need to take out the dough once it’s cooked, manually glaze it, and then select what other toppings or fillings they want to put in it.
While this isn’t much extra gameplay, it does wonders for making each donut you serve feel personal and like you’ve actually made it for the customer. You can put your heart into it and perfectly glaze it, or you can barely touch the thing at all and meet only the minimum requirements for the customer’s order.
While the game does appear to allow you to not completely cover a donut with glaze or toppings in order to match the recipe you’re trying to make, I personally always completely fill out every donut like a true confectioner. I imagine that most other players will do the same, as making the donuts is half of the fun, but one has to wonder if that kind of pride in your work will remain for the whole game.
Every second the player spends glazing a donut, and every topping they put on it, is more money taken from their bank account to please a single customer. During the press demo, I had several days where I made less than a single dollar worth of profits by the end of the day. Deep down, I know I can raise profits by putting less love into making donuts, but is that a sacrifice I would be willing to make?
Of course, it’s hard to get a good grasp on whether money will actually matter in the main game. Both the public and press demos I played gave me more than enough money to completely fill out every donut. Perhaps in the future I will need to be more careful, but for now I shall please every customer.
On the subject of those donuts, I was slightly disappointed that there seems to be no unique dialogue for giving characters the wrong emotional mood enhancer, as, instead of displaying the wrong emotion, you’ll just get a simple “This isn’t what I ordered ” line. However, I do understand the logistical problems that would arise from needing to write and voice incorrect dialogue lines for half a dozen different emotions, so this is more of a small nitpick than a serious complaint.
Now that we’ve gone over the gameplay loop of High Times, let’s take some time to speak about the cast of characters that the player will be serving these donuts to. 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 on 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.
The dialogue and comedy of High Times is an acquired taste, and one that is going to make or break the game for many. Jokes and character development aren’t exactly subtle and rely a lot on pop cultural references and characters saying wild/out there things meant to shock the player.
Of the two demos I played, I was most interested in seeing how characters like Lucy and the cheerleader twins Emma and Emmette would develop in the main game, and of course, I am curious to learn about Riri, the foreign girl who dresses in a full-body chicken suit at all times. Each of these characters had interesting character hooks and designs, which I adored.
While I have no shortage of compliments for the women in High Times’ cast, I sadly have less nice things to say about the various men who visit your donut shop during both demos. I don’t necessarily have anything bad to say about them either; I just found those characters to be much more bland with both their character designs and storyline hooks.
Now, perhaps this is simply a consequence of my attraction tastes primarily aligning toward women rather than men, but I don’t see how one will be more inclined to try dating a character as normal and generic looking as Connor compared to the more vibrant characters like Lucy or Riri.
Because of this, I would have to say that I overall found the cast of High Times to be a mixed bag. With the exception of Harry, I just found all of the guys in this game to be too vanilla to be interesting so far. It comes as no shock to me that Harry is the only one of these guys to appear on the title screen.
Overall, despite having mixed feelings on some of the characters I met, I had an enjoyable time with the demos for High Times and am looking forward to the release of the full game. The demo for the game is currently available on Steam, and the full game will be released on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X, Nintendo Switch, and Steam on July 23, 2026.
