Every now and again, a game like Kiln comes around and blows people away with a creative idea built around a simple mechanic. When I first saw it during the January 2026 Xbox Developer Direct, I was immediately sold on the premise—make pots and then have those pots do battle. It’s so simple, yet so charming that
But as I’ve said before, an interesting idea does not a good game make, and Kiln squanders almost all the potential it could have had on an early release that needed way more time in the oven. It’s a lacklustre multiplayer game built around a creation gimmick that could have been fun, had it actually been accessible.
Something I’ve said before about the game industry is how the wrong lessons are consistently learned from a game’s shaky launch and subsequent success. It began with No Man’s Sky, which I’ve said numerous times was lightning in a bottle that no other studio was going to replicate, and yet numerous others have released broken, empty sandbox games with a “release it now, patch it later” mentality, and all have failed.
“Every now and again, a game like Kiln comes around and blows people away with a creative idea built around a simple mechanic.”
Similarly, I can’t help but feel like the success of Splatoon inspired a subset of creators to try and forge a multiplayer experience around a single unique idea, and none have come close to capturing Splatoon’s success. It’s important to remember that when Splatoon launched on the Wii U, it was basically a single game mode built around a single idea, but that idea was so creative and well executed that you almost didn’t even notice the lack of depth, which was later remedied through updates.
But Kiln is nowhere near that level of creativity, though. Looking back on that initial reveal trailer, it almost feels like a case of false advertising. A big deal was made of the game’s pottery mechanic, which is not nearly as intuitive as was initially suggested and is HARSHLY restricted behind level-up unlocks. At the start, players are given access to the “medium” clay ball, which lets them make pots, jugs and cups that are all essentially “well-rounded characters.” At level four, players get the small blob, which allows for faster but more fragile characters, and at level six, players get the Big ball, allowing for slower but stronger creations.
Now, in theory, this kind of makes sense. You need to incentivize players to engage with your game mode, and restricting different “character types” behind level-ups is one way to do that. But for a game that sold itself so hard on the freedom of its creativity, locking anything behind level-ups just feels kind of needlessly restrictive.
What’s even worse is, for some asinine reason, creative tools that are essentially only used to adjust the look and texture of your pots are locked behind higher levels—granted, they’re just the high end of the single digits, but it feels so completely unnecessary. The whole gimmick of this game is to let players make fun pots and then have them do battle, and there aren’t really any ways to break the mould for unfair builds, so why not just let them utilize every tool?
“Kiln feels to me like a case of style over substance…”
Not that the creation element is particularly inventive anyway. Something about the pottery shaping feels weird and isn’t particularly intuitive. It feels both too pretentious and too committed to realism, so you’re not really given a clear sense of your limitations. Sometimes it feels like you can build a pot to a seemingly endless degree, but then subtle touches can change the entire shape—adhering to real-world clay physics.
And you never feel like you have the kind of control you would want in this game—again, committing to the logic that even subtle touches would change the shape in a realistic way. At first, I wondered if it was because I was using a controller and maybe using a mouse would be better, but then I remembered this game was meant for Xbox, so it was designed with a controller in mind (one would hope).
And the single gameplay mode this game is built around isn’t fun enough to really justify any of it. As highlighted in the reveal trailer, players engage in a battle mode called “Quench,” where they must run around an arena, collecting water to spray onto their opponents’ Kiln. First team to knock three health-bars off their opponent’s Kiln wins the game. Again, in theory, it’s a fun idea, but there’s just so little to it that it gets really boring really fast.
There’s very little in the way of strategy needed to win—you basically just rush your opponent to get a few splashes in. Kilns don’t regain health after losing it, so there’s no penalty for just trying to juke opponents and get a few cheap and dirty splashes before being smashed. There’s no in-game communication, so you can’t really coordinate with teammates, and in almost all my matches, I found that if you just guard the Kiln with even a medium pot, you could pretty effectively keep enemies away from the Kiln while your team goes on the offensive.
And as I said, the actual game of Kiln is so genuinely boring that playing it to unlock the creative tools was such a massive chore that I genuinely started to resent it by the end. Battling is a monotonous button masher. There are only five arenas, and despite being based on different gods from various mythologies, none are particularly memorable in visual style or music. And it’s all just such a homogeneous mess of nothing.
Kiln feels to me like a case of style over substance, hoping that Double Fine’s signature aesthetic and a creative idea will make up for the fact that there’s nothing really behind the veneer. For a game launching even at $19.99, it needed a few more game modes, a few more ideas, and to DRASTICALLY remove the barriers to creativity. There are way better online multiplayer games out there; you don’t need to play this.
And based on its Roadmap (because, of course, it has one), not much is coming in the way of actual gameplay updates, so I honestly don’t see it getting any better over time.
