Katy and Bob Way Back Home

Short version: 65%

Katy and Bob is hardly an innovation in the diner dash type time manager genre, but it is easy, lasts fairly long, and provides enough fun to justify its price.

Long version:

Katy and Bob: Way Back Home is a standard Diner Dash/Delicious clone, where we play as two spoiled rich kids stranded on an island by their father, so they can learn a lesson of self-reliance. This is pretty much the entire plot, but these games were never famous for their storylines.

Since we run a bar instead of a restaurant, we do not have to worry about seating, only customer temperaments and the large variety of things they can order—cocktails, juice, ice cream, and so on, all with an assortment of dressings. Furthermore, there is a small tycoon-like layer, where we can buy upgrades for our characters (these are permanent) and for the bar as well (these reset every 20 stages).

Despite this complexity, Katy and Bob remains casual level game. Some of the 60 stages may need preparations in bar upgrades, the timer can be a bit tight, but it is also easy to keep customers perpetually happy by chaining long combos together, even if we have to make them wait beforehand. This trick can make stages repetitive, but it is part of the genre anyway, so if you enjoy dash games, you will definitely like Katy and Bob.

Please see my curator page for more games that are worth your time

Approximate amount of time to 100%: 10h
Estimated achievement difficulty: 5/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1, there is level selection
Has it been in a bundle: Yes
Is there a good guide available: No, but you won't need any
How many people have completed this game at the time I'm writing this review: 24 on Astats

Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No, you can choose for easy. Imo is the easy difficulty hard enough.
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

This first part of the Katy and Bob series (which is released a few days later on steam than the second installment) is a bit harder than "Katy and Bob: Safari Cafe". That title had easy achievements, not really hard. This one challenges you to get every task and expert score on every level. I would highly suggest to first play through the game and try your best to get to that score and those tasks, but going back later. That way, you will have all the artifacts, which makes it a little bit easier. Level 39, where you have to get a score of 5500, gave me the most problems; all the others that I missed on the first try I got on the second or third try. I don't know if others have this as well, but for me, the game was easier when I turned off the music of the game or listened to my own music. I can't explain why, but maybe it helps others too...

This game has a few problems, like when you choose "replay" while in a level there is a 90% chance the game will crash. The fullscreen mode gave me weird graphics: I turned that off before starting to play this game. The scariest bug was when I finally got to that score of 5500 on level 39, the last task I needed for 100%... The game crashed when the level ended! I was afraid I would have to do it again, but the game picked up that I got the last task and gave me my last 2 missing achievements. I wish they would fix those bugs, but the game is from 2012 (came later to Steam), so I don't have high hopes for those fixes. Luckily they are not game-breaking bugs.

Katy and Bob Way Back Home isn't a bad game, but it really isn't that good either. There are better restaurant/time management games, buy one of those instead.