TL;DR — Skip Buying It, Try It on Game Pass
Double Fine made a pottery brawler where you sculpt pots and then smash them against other players’ pots. The concept is genuinely fun for about two hours. Then you run out of maps, run out of modes, and start wondering why there’s no single-player option. At $19.99 on Steam and PS5, Kiln is a tough sell. On Game Pass Ultimate, where the price is effectively $0 extra? Worth a weekend.
What Kiln Actually Is
Kiln launched April 23 on Xbox Series X|S, PC (Steam and Xbox), PS5, and Game Pass Ultimate. It’s multiplayer-only — there is no campaign, no bots, no solo mode. You shape pots on a pottery wheel, customize them with glazes and accessories, then take them into 4v4 arena matches.
The goal in each match: grab water and dump it on the enemy team’s kiln. You fight, you roll, you smash each other’s ceramic bodies. It’s part Splatoon, part Mario Kart battle mode, part art class.
The studio behind it is Double Fine, the team that made Psychonauts and Psychonauts 2. Kiln started as a 2017 internal game jam prototype during Double Fine’s “Amnesia Fortnight” event. It took nine years to go from prototype to release.
The Pottery Part Works
Making pots is the best part of Kiln. The wheel interface is intuitive on controller — you pull and push clay on a 2D plane to shape your pot body. Then you add handles, spouts, glazes, and stickers. Each pot shape has a different special ability in combat, so there’s a real connection between how you build and how you fight.
Advanced creation tools unlock as you level up, and multi-color glazing takes actual practice. This isn’t a superficial creation system tacked onto a fighter — the pottery workshop is half the game, and it’s the half that works best.
DayOne’s review put it well: “Every multiplayer match I played managed at least one moment that made me smile or laugh.” The hub area, called The Wedge, lets you see other players’ creations, and some of them are genuinely impressive.
The Multiplayer Part Is Thin
Here’s the problem. Kiln has a small selection of arenas and limited game modes. Reviews across the board say the same thing: fun at first, shallow fast.
- IGN Spain (70): “The current catalog falls a bit short — we’ll have to wait and see how it grows.”
- COGconnected (75): “Kiln feels constrained by a lack of alternative modes and maps.”
- Metro GameCentral (70): Praised the creativity but noted the game needs more content to sustain players.
- Xbox Achievements (80): The highest score, calling it “absurdly fun” but acknowledging it’s “light on content.”
The Metacritic average sits at 67 (Mixed or Average) from 12 critic reviews. Only 25% positive, 67% mixed, 8% negative.
The Steam player count tells the harder story. Kiln peaked at 193 players on Steam in its first 24 hours. For context, Double Fine’s previous game Keeper peaked at 191. That’s not a typo — a game from the studio behind Psychonauts 2 is pulling numbers that would be low for a solo indie dev.
What’s Missing
The absence of a single-player mode is Kiln’s biggest mistake. Not every multiplayer game needs one, but a pottery creation game built around creativity should have a sandbox or challenge mode for solo play. The Reddit threads about Kiln are full of people saying they’d love to just make pots without the competitive pressure.
Performance is reportedly rough on PC, and the learning curve for combat is steeper than the creation tutorial suggests. The DayOne review noted that “some of the more advanced pot creation tools are unlocked later and are much more complex to use,” which creates an odd situation where the creative side has depth but the combat side doesn’t.
Price Breakdown
- Steam: $19.99
- PS5: $19.99
- Xbox: $19.99
- Game Pass Ultimate: Included (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, PC)
At $19.99, Kiln is competing with games that offer 10x the content. On Game Pass, it’s a no-risk download. Try the pottery workshop, play a few matches, and see if the community sticks around long enough to justify learning the combat.
The Verdict
Kiln has a great concept, a charming art style, and a pottery creation system that’s more fun than it has any right to be. But it launched with too few maps, too few modes, no single-player, and a player count that suggests the community might not last.
If you have Game Pass, download it this weekend. The pottery workshop alone is worth a couple hours. Just don’t pay $20 for it — not until Double Fine adds enough content to justify the price tag.
Score: 6/10 — Great creation tools, thin multiplayer, needs more of everything. Game Pass makes it a fair deal.
