Kiln Review – Half Baked

Have you ever had an idea that sounded brilliant on paper but you just knew, in your heart of hearts, wasn’t feasible? Several factors could be at play, and ultimately, it remains a pipe dream. One of the reasons why Double Fine Productions is so highly regarded is that it takes those ideas and concepts and creates truly imaginative worlds, bustling with memorable characters and unorthodox narratives, irrespective of business sense. It doesn’t always hit the mark, but when it does, you get results like Psychonauts 2. Even efforts like Brutal Legend stand out in history.

Well, Kiln is probably the first real exception to that. I don’t understand why it would go in this direction or how it could deliver something to appeal to the casual PvP crowd.

In its over-the-top, comedic announcement – later revealed to be highly scripted and exhausting – Kiln showcased a fusion of two base human instincts: Creation and destruction. The former was brought forth by an in-game pottery system, where your playable character could be given form and customized with various designs, stickers, and more. The latter is where the actual gameplay came in: Competitive multiplayer. That’s right – you were going to take those lovingly crafted pots and by gosh, destroy them in PvP matches against others.

It was almost easy to forget amid all this that the name actually comes from the core objective. Because you’re not just a pot smacking other pots, but also carrying water to extinguish the enemy team’s Kiln. The reasoning for this is flimsy at best, but Double Fine handles it with the usual narrative flair.

Plucked out of a shattered universe by Celadon, your spirit is given form in a pot. You have the freedom to shape other pots at will, and it’s not long before she sends you off to compete against spirit-bound pots, mysteriously teasing all the while.

Despite its relatively short length, this prologue highlights Double Fine’s strengths. Characterization, writing, a natural flow to the dialogue (one that becomes decidedly less enjoyable when reduced to standard vendor-speak) – and the set-up isn’t bad at all. If it were designed as a single-player game and given much more narrative gravitas and direction to go with the studio’s signature humor, Kiln could have really delivered something special narrative-wise.

Unfortunately, you’re then transported to a social hub where you can either shape different pots to inhabit, speak to Slip the dog who sells decorations, queue up for a match or invite others. On a daily basis, there’s a single pot that really wants you to smack it around and break it. Surprisingly, this comes across as only comically twisted, and I hope it stays that way.

One of the main selling points of Kiln is that you can design your own pot, and to that end, regardless of how creative you manage to be within the confines of its borders, there are eight “shapes.” For example, a rudimentary Vessel can unleash a charged sword slash. The longer it’s held, the more damage dealt in a forward arc, potentially smashing multiple opponents at a time. Craft a Bowl, and you can channel a Tornado that traps enemies and damages them. A Bottle can, meanwhile, unleash a stabbing Thrust that, while best suited for single-target, does a massive amount of damage.

You can further refine designs to achieve a proper balance of health and water capacity, or lean towards one over the other. The benefits are obvious – more health means more survivability in fights, while more water capacity means you can potentially deal more damage to the enemy Kiln.

Problems arise immediately once you start seeing other players with abilities that are simply not on your shelf, regardless of the shape. That’s because there’s also the clay size. As you level up, you get two more choices – Small and Large Clay, the former with more speed, which makes catching them with the awkward combos tedious, and the latter emphasizing more health. Currently, there are players taking advantage of the Small Cup’s Snake Can ability, which can deal damage over time. Landing the ability isn’t difficult, and there’s pretty much no counterplay. It can even stack, making it all the more obnoxious.

Then again, the Medium Cup’s Popcorn Blast isn’t any less skill-based, since you can charge it indefinitely, and it heavily damages enemies in a radius, even knocking them away. At least you can roll away from that if you know it’s coming.

Beyond the Clay types are different tools for further refining a pot (also locked behind leveling up), though you can enable a cross-section view for free. But once you’ve got the design down, it’s off to Quench, the only game mode where two teams of four players duke it out. And right away, I have to ask: Even if it’s only $20, why only one mode? Why no free-for-all, or something with larger teams? Not that the population is actually booming or anything, with a peak of less than 200 concurrent on Steam, but why not have private matches to let players alter the rules as they see fit?

If you can look past the iffy targeting and otherwise awkward melee combat, the map design in Kiln is…fine. There’s a stage with a mosh pit, where the center continually dips down, allowing for isolated skirmishes (or a top off of water), and another that involves platforming across moving boats to reach the enemy kiln. Athena’s War Room is interesting because both kilns are essentially across from each other – the water is located in a hedge maze-like layout, and you can shoot water to create timed barricades. This map was perhaps my favorite, since there were plenty of ways to evade and bamboozle enemies when you’re not all gathered at the junction, engaging in one big melee. Thinking I had cornered an opponent, only for them to dip under an opening and then re-emerge with a Sword thrust was pretty cool.

But such moments of strategy and counterplay are few and far between, despite Kiln placing so much emphasis on the same (right down to swapping to a different shape mid-match as a counterpick). I also found it quite annoying that most times when attacked by two players, the hit stun makes it nearly impossible to fight back. Granted, this emphasizes teamwork and rolling away while weak to find some backup, but it is so easily abusable when simply running around with another teammate and ganging up on those caught out.

You could argue that it’s not a “serious” PvP game, and yet, that just makes me wonder about the whole point of Kiln’s existence. It’s a faux Capture the Flag-style objective-based mode, with some MOBA lite meets party brawler elements – an intriguing fusion, but also one that never even sniffs the highs of any of the best in these genres.

And much as I actually like the art direction, especially in the stages, and the sound design, the performance on PC is truly an anomaly. Check the recommended requirements – an Intel Core Ultra 5 225 or AMD Ryzen 7 5700X, 32 GB of RAM and a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT with 12 GB VRAM – and then tell me whether it delivers fidelity deserving of the same. As a result, I had to run it on Medium settings at 1440p with DLSS and Frame Gen enabled. At least this delivered a relatively smooth frame rate, but the occasional hitch was noticeable.

At the end of the day, despite how neat it can be to craft a pot so thoroughly, Kiln is just another competitive multiplayer title to add to the pile – Double Fine’s own Bleeding Edge moment. Even if it receives more content down the line – which is usually when a player base massively drops – its uniqueness belies a gameplay loop that quickly becomes tedious and repetitive. Mostly dead on arrival and probably not aspiring to much more than an awkward experiment, I really hope it’s just that and nothing more.

This game was reviewed on PC.