Double Fine has announced their new unique Pottery Brawling Game Kiln for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC.
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Molding a game into shape is a lot like bringing a piece of pottery to life from a chunk of clay. You must be nimble enough to maintain its shape all the way through to the firing process to keep your vision intact, which requires a tremendous amount of patience where a misstep can have it all fall apart – but with enough persistence, creativity, and elbow grease, beautiful art can come out of the fire.
Now, Kiln has arrived to complement my metaphor with its unique blend of pottery creation and multiplayer party brawling, wrapped in Double Fine’s singular magic. Revealed during the latest Developer_Direct, where we got to meet the team behind this upcoming game, you play as a little spirit tasked with creating and inhabiting pots of all sizes and shapes, before jumping into team-based multiplayer battle arenas against your fellow players’ own clay creations.
Creating your own pot isn’t just a pleasant side activity – you’re quite literally handcrafting your pot from scratch, with your choices directly influencing how your character plays in the game. In talking with Project Lead Derek Brand, it’s these custom pottery creations that help bring the unique elements of Kiln to life. The team worked incredibly hard to balance the feeling of doing it yourself with an accessibility that allows you to jump into the game feeling as though you’ve made the right pot for the right job.
“Making pots in real life is really difficult,” explains Brand. “It takes a lot of practice, and you can get good at it over time, but it is not an easy thing to just jump into. We wanted to make the pot-making super easy and accessible – it’s just a button and a control stick – and you can make any kind of shape you wanted. We wanted people to immediately feel like they’re masters at this craft.”
In my time with an early build of the game, I found the pottery creation aspect incredibly accessible as Brand had intended. Throwing a chunk of clay onto the wheel and then seamlessly moving into the molding portion of creation felt very natural. As I moved my analog stick up and down along the side of turning clay, it wasn’t long until I started to get the hang of it. Short and round, tall and thin, or a little bit of both, the tools were there to make any shape of pot I wanted to.
Determining what shape you make starts with the amount of clay you want to craft with – small, medium, or large. This is your first big decision – do you want to be a fast little pot, more balanced, or huge and durable? Within each of those weight classes there are eight shapes you can make on the wheel, like bottles and cups and bowls to carry water into battle (water is a huge part of Kiln’s competitive side, more on that later).
Each shape you create comes with their own special move, their own basic attack, and their own air attack – I’m told there are 24 total special attacks in the game, and they’re all inspired by the functionality of their shapes. So, a little plate which looks like a hockey puck can have a trick shot that will ricochet off multiple enemies. For cup-shaped pots, you have an area-of-effect attack that shoots out popcorn. Or if you make a big cylinder, that can turn into a huge hammer that can slam down and obliterate enemies.
“The whole pottery part is such that it grabs people who might not want to jump into a multiplayer game,” Brand adds. “Some people just want to try pot making. And if we can, we just slowly ease them into the ‘I want to punch something now with this pot.’ We don’t want it to be a hard shift from those two things.”
Something I had to consider when shaping my pots is that my water capacity and health are inverse to each other – the greater capacity, the less health I have. This had me think of the future framework of my teams and ensure there’s at least some variety – skinny battlers, large haulers, and a mix in-between – that I could bring into battle.
Finally, comes the customization, where you can pick from a variety of glazes, handles, patterns, and even stickers to truly make this little creation your own (I put a pizza sticker on mine). Once that has all been set, the pot goes into the fire to solidify its final shape – then it’s off to The Wedge, the game’s social hub, which is this little slice of the goddess Celadon’s domain.
The Wedge has a lot to offer a new player fresh from the pottery studio. There’s a dojo where pots can train and practice against dummies and test out special moves. You can find other pots that players have put on display (that you can hop into and ‘claim’ to use in battle). There’s also the in-game store run by Celadon’s dog and companion, Slip. He takes all the fun things he finds around in the universe like arcade cabinets, old microphones, Excalibur, and puts them up for sale as stickers and trinkets to decorate your pots – you earn credits for participating in matches that you can then spend on customization goods here. And then there’s Potty, who likes to get destroyed. Think of him as a punching bag for you to practice some of your combat moves on. He’s not an expert in combat, but he’s still a team player who want to help as much as possible. If you find him and smash him in the Lobby – he’s in a different location every day – he’ll give you some unique rewards.
Playing around in The Wedge, I found it extremely entertaining and open-ended. Like finding soccer balls to kick around, jumping into vacant pots, or trying to stack them up. It all seems designed to push you towards playing together, and a more physical and less verbal way to communicate with other players – which as Brand tells me, was its intended design.
“We have a communication wheel where you can do things like putting a little heart above your head. So, if you really like someone’s pot, you can say ‘I heart that.’ You can also dance. We wanted to really strip these interactions way down to, ‘I like that’ or ‘Let’s hang out.’ You can also do all the interactions you can do in a match. So, you can roll and you could just flop around and wiggle and goof around with each other. And depending on your size and shape of your pot, these interactions can be really entertaining.”
Jumping into the battle portion of Kiln, I played the Quench game mode across a variety of different maps, in which two teams of four battle it out to pour water on the opponents’ giant kiln. The maps were unique and varied, each with their own set of obstacles to overcome as you’d work to transport water inside your pot from one end of the map to the other.
There never really seemed to be a need to verbally communicate – everyone in my matches seemed to understand what needed to get done: carry water, douse the kiln, and protect our base. And if you need to change your strategy on the fly (say you have too many haulers and you need to bring in some muscle), you can do that before you respawn by picking another pot off your shelf. Strategies can vary across maps, but that’s what the core gameplay boiled down to for this mode.
“When we’re thinking about the world, we wanted to really incorporate this element of [an] old, ancient technology and art form that has been around forever; we wanted to really lean on that,” Brand says. “You start off in this world of Celadon; she’s this deity of creation and destruction. She embodies both of those things. And you’re this little spirit, this little bodiless floating sprite. But within this world, there are other gods that aren’t around, but they have these little floating islands of their old domains, and each map is based off ancient Greek or ancient Egyptian gods.”
During my gameplay session, one of my favorite maps to battle on was Athena’s map room, which featured a variety of narrow passageways to circumnavigate, as well as strategically placed sponges that you could pour water on to create a temporary wall to hinder your opponent’s movement. On more than one occasion I was able to successfully intercept the other team, blocking them from accessing our kiln, and buying my team some precious seconds to carry water to the enemy’s base.
“We gave the old gods their own distinct personalities. For example, Hermes has a map set in his shipping facility, where packages are constantly being sent out and treadmills going back and forth shooting packages you’ll have to avoid. Then there’s Dionysus’ map, which is like a Boogie Lounge, which features a dance floor at its center — if you step onto one of the tiles, you’re forced to dance, creating a dynamic battleground where some players are fighting while others end up dancing.”
Brand tells me the team is really pushing for variation in each map, and less on the game modes for launch. “In post-launch, we really want to hear what the community responds to and what they like and have that dialogue. At launch we’re really committing to Quench mode and the lobby experience. We’re going to be shipping with several maps — they all have a unique gameplay hook to them — and they’re very different from each other.”
My time with Kiln has been short, but I really like its unique approach to the multiplayer party brawler genre. Being able to wholly create your very own battler, mixed in with a variety of attacks, kept all my battles engaging and incredibly fun to participate in. There’s also a very strong strategic meta here underneath how charming it appears, with a large variety of special attacks, pottery shapes to consider, and unique maps to master, giving us a lot to look forward to when the game launches Spring 2026, as an Xbox Play Anywhere and Handheld Optimized title on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Cloud Gaming, PlayStation 5, Steam, and with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.
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