Kero Blaster

In Kero Blaster, the player controls a frog working for Cat & Frog, a teleporter company. Armed with a peashooter, he has to clean all the teleporters of strange black monsters. The player has to work their way through a series of linear stages, by means of running, gunning and jumping. USGamer described the gameplay as "akin to ...

Contra or old-school, pre-Symphony of the Night Castlevanias." Kero Blaster is controlled by changing direction, jumping, and charging and firing the player character's weapon. Holding down the fire button continues to fire in the direction the character was facing when he started shooting, allowing players to move the character and change the firing direction independently.

Kero Blaster was originally supposed to be released in 2013, but Pixel delayed its release just before it was to come out. The game was rebuilt from Gero Blaster, which Pixel announced on BitSummit in Japan, early 2013, but never released. Gero Blaster was a game based on comics that Pixel drew in college, starring himself as a frog and his girlfriend as a cat. While Pixel developed Cave Story entirely on his own, he worked together with Kiyoko Kawanaka for Kero Blaster so that he could stay motivated. When Pixel left the level design and production up to her, Pixel "was able to focus on smaller parts while the stages in the game were steadily being created."

A month before the full release, Pixel released a demo and prologue to Kero Blaster, titled Pink Hour. In this demo, the player is an unnamed pink office worker who must find a missing document to avoid the anger of her boss. The short game is rather hard, due to the limited amount of lives the player has to beat it with.

Before the full release, PCGamer called the free Pink Hour demo "too brief and too difficult to really get to grips with", though it praised the game's trailer. After the release of Kero Blaster, TouchArcade described Pink Hour as a "great way to check out what KeroBlaster is about – or just to get a new level of the game to play." Destructoid described the demo as "hard as nails," yet also as "very lovable."

Kero Blaster received positive reviews upon release. Destructoid praised the game's pacing and replay value, stating that it is the perfect way to introduce someone to the genre of 2D action/platformers. USgamer praised the game's controls, weapons and presentation, calling it an "excellent run-and-gun shooter that plays beautifully," but criticized the short length of the game. PCGamer states that the game sounds "like it could've come from an NES if a composer had spent the past 25 years mastering its sound chip," and though they criticized the high difficulty of the game, PCGamer said that it was "refreshing to play a game with such mechanical purity." Eurogamer stated that Kero Blaster is not less engaging than Cave Story, despite its short length, and describes it as "a three-hour trip that demands to be finished."