I didn’t know much about High Times going into it. I saw that it was a combination of a dating sim and a donut shop sim, and that was all I needed to know. I really do love it when indie games blend two things that haven’t been combined before. The game does a decent job of mixing these ingredients, but it makes some surprising design missteps here and there, and the character writing isn’t always up to par. The result is a mixed bag of donuts that can be fairly filling, while also leaving you hungry for more substance.
High Times starts by letting you design your avatar, but despite being a dating sim, you have zero control over your character’s orientation. No matter what you do, they’re canonically bi, so if you were hoping to play a straight or gay character, you’ll find yourself out of luck. The male romance options are also very underwhelming compared to the female ones, with two romanceable men versus four women. One of the two male options is your character’s long-time best friend, who is currently in a committed relationship, which feels as forced as it does icky.
It doesn’t help that almost all of the romanceable characters are obnoxious caricatures. There’s MJ, a generic rocker girl whose mannerisms are mostly incredibly trite rock clichés. There’s also Harry, a snobby chef who’s overly aloof and hypercritical, who’s at least less irritating than MJ. The aforementioned best friend character, Connor, is highly generic and reminiscent of best friend characters across fiction. Except when he awkwardly hits on the player character, anyway.
The rest is rounded out by Lucy, an NSFW furry artist with rainbow-colored hair and heterochromia (a sentence that lets you know the writers were trying way too hard), Emmette an astrology-loving cheerleader, and Stacy, an influencer in an incredibly revealing outfit.
Weirdly, several of the game’s regular customers are much more likable, which is bizarre. The romanceable characters should all be the best ones, but instead, I didn’t want to really interact with most of them, as they got on my nerves more often than not.
Every character in the game (of which there are a great many) has their own story arc too, although some of the customers are even more one-note and generic than the romanceable ones. For instance, there’s an on-again, off-again couple based on Kurt Cobain and Avril Lavigne (what?!) named Kolt and Ainsley. Kolt is oddly a hippy stereotype who mostly rambles about generic hippy things, while Ainsley talks in incredibly dated Avril Lavigne quotes (you even get an achievement for suggesting that she’s making things complicated. Shoot me now.)
On the other hand, my favourite character is a European princess who’s on the run. She’s disguised herself in a chicken costume because she’s completely insane, but she’s fun since she’s not a generic stereotype like so many of the other characters. Her voice actor leans all the way into this, with a shrill, ridiculous vocal performance that’s consistently entertaining. If only more of the cast were as creative as she is. Not that all the material from the generic characters is bad, though. They do get fleshed out at times, as High Times thematically focuses on making amends and accepting the past.
The writing isn’t bad, it’s just often too hackneyed for its own good. Another pair of customers, named Thumblrina and Bredditor, are caricatures of Tumblr and Reddit users. When you boil a character down to that much of a caricature, they also appear at odds with the more believable cast members, such as Dexy, a pretty normal college cheerleader who likes anime. There are so many characters, and the dialogue is shockingly fully voiced despite the absolute mountain of content this game has. This isn’t a game you can blow through in a day or two; it’s huge, which also explains why the writing is so hit or miss.
The donut stuff sadly doesn’t fare much better. It’s incredibly simple and gets pretty dull after a while. A customer comes in (you usually just get a few in an entire day) and tells you which donut they want, so you make it. This is done in an incredibly streamlined way; you set out a sheet of dough, use your chosen mould to cut the shape, fry it, and then decorate it. The twist is that you play as a “mood confectioner,” and the glazes you put on the donuts alter the moods of your customers. Vanilla cheers them up, matcha relaxes them, blueberry makes them sincere, strawberry makes them nostalgic, etc.
It’s a unique idea, and customers will often tell you to pick something for them. There are also a bunch of recipes, as sometimes they’ll request something specific. You get paid for each donut and, if they’re satisfied, their affection meter rises, which lets you see a new scene once it’s filled up. The issue is that there are so many characters that you’ll often have trouble seeing the ones you most want to see. The game gets around this by letting you decorate the shop in a way that makes characters more likely to show up, but since only a few show up a day, this often feels like a crapshoot.
You use money to purchase new flavours, moulds, toppings, and tools (such as letting you add drizzle or filling to your donuts), and certain character arcs are locked behind purchasing some of these. Some arcs are also locked behind advancing the stories of other characters, and in certain instances, early-game character arcs can be locked behind progressing characters you haven’t even met yet, which I found horribly jarring.
Major characters have good and bad endings (and romance endings for the six romanceables), and these characters tend to have considerably more scenes than others. This makes the cast feel even more uneven. Between how wonky all of this is, how difficult it can be to just focus on your favourites, and how dull the donut-making can get, it’s hard to really recommend High Times. On the other hand, the breadth of content and amount of stuff in here is truly impressive, even if the writing simply can’t keep the quality evenly spread.
High Times: Between how wonky all of this is, how difficult it can be to just focus on your favourites, and how dull the donut-making can get, it's hard to really recommend High Times. – Andrew Farrell
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