Kiln Review: Double Fine’s Pottery-Fueled 4v4 Brawler Arrives
Double Fine Productions, the studio behind the Psychonauts series, has released their latest multiplayer title Kiln on April 23, 2026. The game presents a truly novel concept: players must hand-craft pottery on a spinning wheel before taking their creations into 4v4 team battles. Born from the studio’s internal biennial game jam Amnesia Fortnight, Kiln was conceived by project lead Derek Brand, who stated that he wanted to make strange little creatures and let others do the same — then have those creatures fight. The team even took real-world pottery classes to faithfully replicate the craft for the game’s mechanics.
Before any match begins, players must shape a character from clay — not via face sliders, but by molding clay on a floating potter’s wheel. Players choose from three clay ball sizes: small (agile but fragile), large (high durability and water capacity but slow), and medium. The shaping process — pulling up, flattening, pinching, widening — is tracked in real time, categorizing creations into eight vessel types such as bowls, jars, vases, and goblets. Critically, the resulting shape directly determines a character’s hit points, water capacity, movement speed, and special abilities. Bowl-type vessels bounce across the map, while flat disk-like characters ricochet like hockey pucks upon impact.
The main mode, called Douse the Flame, is straightforward: two teams of four each guard a kiln. Players must find and absorb water on the battlefield, then rush to the opposing team’s kiln to extinguish its fire. Three successful douses win the match. Controls are simple — hitting, jumping, rolling, absorbing water, and extinguishing — making it easy to pick up with friends. During battle, pottery gradually cracks and chips based on impact force and direction. When a vessel breaks, players can either respawn with a pre-made creation from their shelf or quickly return to the potter’s wheel to craft something new on the spot.
Despite its creative foundation, the source notes that Kiln suffers from limited variety. The game launched with only one mode — Douse the Flame — with no ranked play, cooperative missions, or casual mini-games. Only five maps are available at launch, themed around mythological deities but lacking high visual distinctiveness. Additionally, many customization tools and clay sizes are locked behind progression gates, requiring repetitive matches to unlock features that should be freely accessible for creative expression. However, the development team has promised an initial patch later this month to address matchmaking and latency issues, with June DLC reportedly in the works. The concept is undeniably fresh, but Kiln currently feels more like a weekend party game than a lasting competitive title.
