Kiln's pottery combat nails the concept but fumbles the execution

Double Fine launched Kiln on April 23, 2026—a 4v4 multiplayer game where you hand-sculpt pottery characters before battle. The concept came from the studio's internal Amnesia Fortnight game jam, and the dev team took actual pottery classes to nail the craft.

The tactile feedback falls short. The sculpting part offers eight classic vessel types—bowls, jars, vases, chalices—with decent molding detail. But here's the catch: your pottery's shape determines health, water capacity, movement speed, and abilities. Sounds like intentional design, plays like random guesswork. No clear feedback loop tells you what attribute changes you're making with each adjustment.

The core mode, "Extinguish," pits two 4v4 teams against each other—each defending a kiln, fetching water to douse flames, first to three wins. Simple premise, but launch content is one mode and five maps. That's it. Steam concurrent player counts reflect the shallow offering.

Performance holds steady—the cartoon art style keeps hardware demands low. Matchmaking and latency are the real issues. The studio promises a patch later this month to address both, with DLC planned for June. Problem is, the player base has already scattered. Whether post-launch content can pull them back remains uncertain.

Credit where it's due: the concept is genuinely novel. No one's merged pottery crafting with competitive combat before. But novelty doesn't equal playability. One mode and five maps can't sustain a multiplayer game. Wait for the DLC drop. Buying now means signing up for early access testing.