Pixel puzzles are pretty awful and lazy.

You are probably doing a witch-hunt right now.

Heh, no, KISS is just like many of the old indie publishers. There are only a few of these companies now, although KISS is fairly new. They specialise in half-decent indie games, where for a relatively hefty income percentage, they handle the marketing, distribution, and general publishing tasks, so the developers don't have to spend time and effort on the business side of game making.

There aren't many companies like that now that operate legitimally and in the open, the only one outside Japan (where there are a million of them) I can think of from the top of my head is Buka from Russia, they also have a modest presence on Steam. But companies like Alawar and Big Fish Games grew from similar models as well.
And the reason there aren't any more is because self-publishing is easy and the model was originally made for shareware games. A little side fact, but many people don't know that the creators of Doom and Quake, id Software started as a shareware-making studio for a similar publisher like KISS here, making platformer games. (Heck, even Doom itself was a shareware game before they left the publisher after its success.) And the same goes for the makers of the Unreal engine, too.