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Daisuke Amaya's work provides a fierce rebuttal to the accusation that 'they don't make 'em like they used to'. While most indie game-makers are content to appropriate the style of 80s video games as a celebratory, nostalgic wrapping for contemporary ideas, Amaya's games have a deeper sort of period authenticity.This was true of 2004's Cave Story (one of the first and most successful Japanese indie games), with its simple, bold interactions and alluring network of tunnels, and it's true of Kero Blaster, his latest creation, a trim platform game for PC and iOS. Beneath the chunky, flatly coloured pixels, Kero Blaster feels like a lost Atari VCS game, with economical but fluid controls, stout level design and a lazily cool chip-tune soundtrack.
You play as a yellow-cheeked bipedal frog with an adorable two-pixel overbite. Frog works in the inexact field of 'custodial sciences' for the Cat & Frog company. He appears to be the brawn of the operation. His job is to clean up the teleporters that lead from the company's building out into the surrounding countryside. These remote computers have become clogged with what appear to be dust mites, but which are later revealed to be 'Negativus Legatia', or forgotten bits of people's history that have spilled off internet servers into the world.
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