High Times - Dating/Cooking Sim Review

There's something particularly comforting about those games in which you simply serve people. Bar-tending sims, coffee shop sims, diner sims – there's a small niche in games where your job consists of listening to the stories of strangers who come in and unload all their troubles, while you give them something nice and warm.

High Times - Dating/Cooking Sim, created by Yangyang Mobile, joins the ranks of such games, only replacing coffee or cocktails with donuts and alcohol with frosting. This idea might sound rather bizarre at first glance, but once you get accustomed to the concept of a pastry that can help its consumer get lost in nostalgia or find courage, it ceases to be relevant.

As you spend some days working in the donut shop, it becomes clear that what really counts in this game is the person you are meeting and the choice you make regarding what you can do for him or her. The question of whether this premise is enough for a whole visual novel is what matters now, and here is how High Times - Dating/Cooking Sim performs.

You start High Times - Dating/Cooking Sim by building your own character before anything else happens.

You pick between a handful of outfits, several body types, and letting the design land wherever you want, since nothing here is locked behind gender. Before you even get that far, though, the game opens on an odd little scene: a mysterious woman pulls you into a conversation about past heartbreaks, showing you six silhouettes and asking which failed relationship hurt the most.

It's a strange way to open things, but it works, since it quietly sets up your six potential romances without spelling any of it out directly. Once the actual story kicks off, you're thrown behind the counter at the Hotbox, a donut shop in a town called San Mazo.

The owner is off on vacation and, in typical visual novel logic, decided that the smart move before leaving was to sell off basically all the shop's stock, leaving you to somehow keep the place running with nothing to work with. You're not a fresh hire either.

The game treats you as someone with a history here, which matters because many customers already know you, and more than a few of them are exes you don't fully remember the way they do. The donuts you make aren't ordinary ones.

Every flavor is tied to a mood.

Depending on what you serve, you can nudge a customer toward happiness, nostalgia, focus, or a handful of other emotional states. The people walking through the door range from one-off regulars to recurring side characters to your six actual romance options, and nearly everyone is dealing with something.

You get Ainsley and Kolt, two side characters loosely modeled on musicians, working through an old relationship neither of them has fully let go of. You get a punk musician who accidentally sets the shop on fire early on, a chicken-costumed regular who shows up constantly, an influencer obsessed with dance content, and an artist with a much racier online presence than her day-to-day self suggests.

None of it plays as an epic story. Nobody's saving the world here. It is smaller, messier, and more personal, and High Times - Dating / Cooking Sim embraces this rather than trying to reach any higher ground.

The writing is also quite honest when it comes to topics related to the body and identity, with the characters discussing them as easily as they would the weather, almost like the game doesn’t care at all about dancing around them.

Across roughly thirty customer storylines and six main routes with their own separate endings, High Times - Dating/Cooking Sim ends up being a much bigger game than its cutesy premise suggests, easily stretching past fifty hours total if you're chasing everything it has to offer.

On a day-to-day basis, operating Hotbox in High Times - Dating/Cooking Sim can become somewhat repetitive.

Each shift, three customers enter the shop. Their choice is determined by whether they request some particular donut, some kind of emotion they need to experience, or rather give you a general idea of what they want. The phrase "I want something bitter" means they are looking for a chocolate donut, while someone saying he misses his family implies he is longing for a strawberry one, etc.

Making donuts is quite an easy task as well. Namely, one chooses the dough type, drops it into a deep fryer, waits a couple of seconds, then adds glaze and decorations by hand.

All earnings from sales or tips will be used to buy more flavors or toppings, which will be added to the recipe book instantly, so you can find them without searching blindly.

This is also the mode of advancement in the story. There are some characters who will not progress along their storyline unless you have purchased a certain ingredient that corresponds to their storylines; thus, spending money and making purchases is mandatory in order for you to experience the entire story.

You can use your money to decorate your shop, which increases the likelihood that certain customers will visit it. Outside the counter, High Times - Dating/Cooking Sim gives you a social media feed to scroll after each shift, packed with posts from the cast, in-jokes, and the occasional easter egg you'd miss entirely if you skip it.

There's also a text messaging thread running alongside the main story that deepens specific relationships if you keep up with it, though none of it is mandatory reading.

Practically speaking, the game will allow you about eighty save slots in addition to just playing on and not even saving the game.

This is quite helpful when you find out that every single route may take an extremely long time to complete. You should expect that you’ll need anywhere between fifteen and twenty hours to complete a single character’s storyline.

Since there's no combat or puzzle-solving here in the traditional sense, the closest thing High Times - Dating/Cooking Sim has to that kind of core challenge is reading a customer and figuring out what to actually put in front of them. It's less about following the recipe book to the letter and more about paying attention to what someone says before they even finish their order.

If a character is venting about feeling low, matching the flavor to comfort rather than to whatever specific words they used tends to pay off better than a technically correct answer. Customers also remember what you’ve served them in the past, which is why it is important to note details like the preference for the character who hates sprinkles but loves butterflies.

Get it wrong repeatedly, and you will be going home with nothing. The upside of this system is that it gives you a real reason to listen to the dialogue instead of clicking through it, since correctly reading a customer's mood actually feels like it matters.

The downside is that the hands-on part of it —shaping dough, waiting out the fryer timer, applying toppings—never evolves much beyond what it is in the first hour.

If you're not particularly invested in the visual side of decorating a donut, the loop can start to feel like busywork fairly quickly.

This applies especially when stretched across dozens of customers and a fifty-plus-hour game. Then there is the rare hiccup on the technical front, when the instructions needed to advance the particular story of a certain character appear as placeholder text, leaving you in limbo for much longer than necessary, and often until you somehow manage to purchase the correct item by sheer coincidence.

There isn't a traditional experience or leveling system in High Times, but the shop's economy and relationship tracking do a similar job. Every correct order and good conversation choice pushes a character's relationship value forward, and the game does a surprisingly good job of remembering what you've told people, with old conversations resurfacing later in ways that make earlier choices feel like they actually mattered.

Where the grind actually shows up in High Times - Dating/Cooking Sim is the random customer rotation. Only three people show up to the shop each day, and with roughly thirty possible customers cycling through, the odds of seeing a specific character you're invested in get worse the more the cast expands.

Decorating the shop weighs the odds in a character's favor, but even a heavily stacked bonus doesn't guarantee much. An eight-times boost toward one particular character still only translated into seeing her about once a week. Money itself stops feeling like a real stake past the opening stretch, too.

There's technically a bankruptcy game-over state, but it's hard enough to actually hit that it stops factoring into your decisions once you've built up even a modest cushion.

So the real grind in High Times - Dating/Cooking Sim isn't earning donuts or cash; it's waiting out the randomness for the story beats you actually want. Visually, High Times - Dating/Cooking Sim leans loud and colorful. Every character design is distinct enough that you get a read on their personality within seconds of meeting them.

And the cast covers a wide range of looks, right down to character creation letting you land on non-realistic skin tones if that's the direction you want to take your own avatar. The illustration work in High Times - Dating/Cooking Sim holds up well across the board, and small touches, like characters reacting physically when you hand them a donut they actually wanted, add personality to otherwise static scenes.

That said, because you're locked behind the same counter for the entire game, you end up staring at the same slice of screen for dozens of hours, with characters running through similar expressions and poses day after day. Full CG artwork, the kind that would break up that repetition, shows up rarely enough that you'll notice its absence more than its presence.

There are also a few minor irritants in the text: typos, incorrect capitalization, and some text-formatting instructions that apparently slipped into the final product. It doesn’t interfere with the enjoyment, but it’s noteworthy enough to mention.

On the audio side, High Times - Dating/Cooking Sims is fully voiced.

The cast behind it is a genuine surprise for a game this size, pulling in names like LilyPichu, Johnny Yong Bosch, Gianni Matragrano, and Michael Kovach alongside the rest of the roster. The performances carry much of the personality that the character designs already establish, and it's easy to tell the actors leaned into how over-the-top some of these characters are meant to be.

The one consistent issue is that "fully voiced" doesn't always hold up in practice. Several scenes go unexpectedly silent, with one character's segments in particular dropping voice work more often than anyone else's. It's a small thing in isolation, but across a game this long, you'll run into it often enough to notice the pattern.

By the time credits roll on a single route, you'll have spent a genuine chunk of time with these characters, and that's really what High Times - Dating/Cooking Sim is banking on; that you'll care enough about the people to push through the parts of the loop that don't change much.

While the crafting aspect remains cute without ever being particularly meaningful, the heavy use of randomness in character appearances can become quite irritating when you have your eyes set on a certain character. However, most of the responsibility falls on the writing aspect, which favors realistic relationship drama over something grandiose and sees the characters for who they really are rather than the boxes they can check off.

If you're coming in for a tightly paced game built around constant mechanical variety, this probably isn't it. If you're coming in for a long, character-driven hangout with people who feel like they've got actual lives outside of you walking through the door, High Times - Dating/Cooking Sim mostly delivers on that, rough edges and all.