High Times Review

Six Years of Donuts and Baggage

High Times launched on Steam on July 23, 2026, from solo-turned-small developer Yangyang Mobile, following a 2024 Kickstarter and a long public demo period that built a 50,000-wishlist following well before release. The pitch is a genuine hybrid: you play a "Mood Confectioner" running a donut shop called The Hotbox in the fictional city of San Mazo, crafting flavor and topping combinations that literally shift customers' emotions, while slowly working through unresolved history with six exes and dozens of side characters. It's an unusually specific premise, and the review sample, 94% positive across 170 reviews, treats it as one that mostly pays off, with reviewers repeatedly calling out six years of visible development care in the writing, voice work, and character density.

The Donut Loop Is Simple, By Design

Reviewers are split on whether the actual cooking mechanic works as gameplay. On one hand, several praise how forgiving and expressive it is: you can rarely go bankrupt, ingredient combinations genuinely affect story beats, and figuring out which donut fixes which customer's mood is described as satisfying rather than punishing. On the other, a substantial and vocal group finds it repetitive fast, pointing to a lack of quality-of-life tools (no way to search or filter the constant stream of specific requests), a late-game shift toward donuts that must match an exact pre-set recipe rather than a creative one, and donut-making mechanics that feel closer to a mobile game than the substantial fully-3D presentation around it. Both camps agree the mechanic exists mainly to pace out story content rather than to be a deep management sim in its own right.

A Genuinely Massive, Well-Cast Story

Where High Times earns its strongest praise is on the writing and voice side. The full cast, six main romanceable exes plus a best friend and over two dozen recurring customers, is fully voiced by a recognizable roster of English voice actors, and reviewers consistently single out the sheer scale of dialogue, the fake in-game social media feed packed with topical references, and character arcs that land as "real" rather than archetypal, even for non-romanceable customers. Multiple long-time players report 40, 60, even 90-plus hours logged working through routes, and describe the writing's blend of raunchy, chronically-online humor with genuinely heavy emotional material, grief, trauma, past breakups, as a difficult but successful balancing act. A completionist run across all 51 documented endings is estimated by several reviewers at 30 to 50-plus hours.

The Romance Options Skew Heavily, and Some Routes Read as Toxic

The single most repeated specific complaint is the cast's gender balance: four of the six romanceable exes are women and only two are men, with no way to filter or set a preference, which multiple reviewers who prefer male love interests call a real and disappointing limitation given how much time each route demands. A smaller but more pointed cluster of criticism targets the writing quality of certain male routes specifically, with detailed reviews describing manipulative, gaslighting, or dismissive dynamics in at least two storylines that read as uncomfortably close to real relationship red flags rather than intentional drama, alongside a shared frustration that every romance option is a former partner the player character apparently ghosted, leaving little room for a clean-slate connection.

Raunchy Humor Throughout, Not Explicit but Not Subtle

High Times leans heavily into adult-flavored innuendo and internet-culture humor, jokes about furry fandom, omegaverse tropes, and suggestively named donut recipes turn up regularly enough that several reviewers explicitly flag the game as "not for kids" despite its bright, cartoon-cute art style, and recommend a heads-up for anyone expecting a purely wholesome cooking sim. None of this rises to depicted sexual content on the store page, and Steam lists no content warnings for it, but the tone runs consistently closer to raunchy comedy than to the tags like "Cozy" and "Relaxing" might suggest, and it's worth knowing that going in.

A Smooth Launch for a Six-Year Project

Technical complaints in the sample are notably minor for a game of this scope. A handful of reviewers report desynced voice lines where the spoken dialogue doesn't quite match the subtitle text, the occasional repeated line with slightly different flavor text, and a few isolated instances of a scene referencing a relationship status the player hadn't actually reached yet. There's no manual save system, saves happen automatically between shifts, and at least one reviewer flags the lack of ultrawide monitor support as leaving black bars on either side of the screen. None of this reads as launch-breaking, and several reviewers who backed the project since its 2024 Kickstarter specifically credit the beta-testing community and a steady stream of day-one patches with ironing out the rougher edges before most players ever saw them.

Verdict

High Times delivers an unusually ambitious dating sim: a fully-voiced, deeply-written cast wrapped around a donut-crafting gimmick that's more pacing device than deep mechanic, all backed by six years of visible development care that reviewers overwhelmingly reward with their time, sometimes to the tune of 40-plus hours. It isn't for everyone, the gender-skewed romance roster, some genuinely uncomfortable writing choices in a couple of male routes, and constant raunchy humor will turn off players expecting a purely cozy experience, and the grindy pacing of the shop-management side will test patience long before any single route concludes. But for players who came here for VA-11 Hall-A-style bar-sim vibes crossed with unapologetically horny, heartfelt visual novel writing, High Times is a rare release that lives up to years of hype.