The aesthetic of High Fructose is a little all over the place. It's an edgy parkour game in the style of the Ghostrunner games, except my character is a furry fox, and the targets at which his blade is aimed are not the robot soldiers of an oppressive regime, but evil fruits which drop arcade-style coins and when you kill them. But for all that eclectic collection of vibes, I found its Steam Next Fest demo to be extremely fun - even before I found the panda gun.
As your samurai fox (or one of three other animal warriors), it's your job to slice through waves of corrupted fruit in an attempt to reclaim a sacred orchard. Conveniently, these fruits are hanging around in a freerunner's dream - an arena of tall, wide pillars that enable plenty of wallrunning and airdashes. It's a little more eclectic than the carefully curated freerunning arenas of Mirror's Edge or Ghostrunner, and the hordes of enemies make for somewhat less precise katana-ing, but it's still a satisfying playground.
Chop through enough fruit and you'll clear the stage, using the coins they dropped to buy powerups, like extra dashes, more HP or speed, or extra upgrades for the drone that accompanies you through each level, blasting its weapons every few seconds to help you thin the waves of enemies in front of you.
Getting through the enemies quickly is important not just for your overall progression, but because High Fructose further confuses its vibe by having you create smoothies on the fly. At the start of a run, you can pick a recipe, each of which is made by slicing open the corresponding number of fruits. Killing two strawberries, for instance, grants extra HP and a seed that can be used for further upgrades, but choosing the recipe that requires four strawberry corpses summons some mobs that fight for you.
Eventually, you have a whole book of recipes on hand, creating cocktails of fruit-based buffs. The idea is to regularly switch between them, taking out one list of foes to gain their bonus, then changing to another. The more recipes you complete, the quicker you can swap, and the faster you should get through a level, and the more coins you should be able to collect.
Eventually, I found a recipe called Cherry Cataclysm, which reduces the cooldown on your drone's weapons for 11 seconds if you can dispatch a few of High Fructose's snake-like cherry monsters. For the heavily drone-based build that I'd been cooking up, this was already excellent news, but then I stumbled on the guns that shoot bears.
Brown, black, and panda bears could now all be shot out of my drone every few seconds. And when I managed to cook up my Cherry Catacylsm, they'd fire even faster, until any attempt I might make to find and cut up a fruit was often stymied by a rampaging ursine that got there before me. Within just a few seconds, each stage was overrun by roaring, shaggy allies who'd chase down any fruit, deafening me in the process.
Is it how High Fructose was supposed to be played? I'm almost certain that the answer is no. But among all the samurai freerunning elements, I'm impressed to see that it's actually prepared to let you approach its roguelike systems however you like. A given build might focus on enhanced speed or more attacks, but if you give me a panda gun I'm absolutely going to use it, even if it messes with most of how the rest of the game was clearly intended.
