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When I heard Double Fine was wheeling out a 4v4 multi-fest about pottery-on-pottery violence, it fired me up. It’s a personal imperative of mine to sample anything made by the team that gave me Psychonauts and also had the good sense to publish Gang Beasts. And so, in an afternoon of LAN-ing with other media, I got to see if Kiln was all it was cracked up to be.
Despite what the screens and trailers may indicate, your avatar isn’t a vase, nor a pot, a jar, or any other ceramic object on Link’s smash-on-sight list. In Kiln, you’re actually a spirit. A glutinous, Slimer glob of protoplasm that may be customised to your body shape, eyes, brow, and colour preferences. I chose a balloon with a butt crack ‘til next Tuesday, and my defining facial characteristics would be best described as sexy eyes with a monobrow.
Soon after, it’s tutorial time. Within a top-down world, I steer my Casper over to some pre-made pottery, and then a tap of A lets me possess a pretty ace-looking vase.
It’s at this point where you’ll go from free-floating vapour to something suddenly bound by actual physics. On the L-stick, I trot around on stumpy legs at a steady clip. Holding LT flops me down on my side, at which point my speed doubles, but now, spatially, I’m also a low hurdle.
Obviously, that’s gonna make me great for zipping through vent-like breaks in any arena I’ll be fighting in. Alternatively, I may need to remain upright at attention and use my jump to leapfrog over fences instead. When I find myself unsuited for a particular task, a tap on the D-pad shatters me back into ghost form, which allows me to go meld with a holy grail-looking cup instead.
I immediately feel like I have chosen wisely. Having less mass and a more diminutive footprint than a vase means I can zip around at twice the speed and sneak through tinier gaps in terrain (e.g., the negative space of a hastily padlocked double gate). At this point, some of you might be doing the math and asking, ‘Why would I not just play this as a speedy little egg cup?’ I’d be a mug not to.”
Capacity and health are the answer to that, my friend. Being composed of a pissweak amount of clay makes you about as brittle as a Boomer trying to return soup in a deli. An unfortified piece of pottery will go to pieces more quickly under the onslaught of punches or butt stomps. If that happens, you’re heading back to your home base, a bloody big kiln, for a respawn. Your capacity stat, on the other hand, is how much water your chosen form can hold. That’s super important stuff, as you’ll need to hold RT to spew as much of that as possible into your enemy’s kiln to extinguish it. Issue a H2-whoa on their home base three times, and victory is yours.
Hidden problem: water, the essence of wetness and your future victories, is tough to transport. Rolling up to your objective is pretty much out, as splaying yourself out sideways will just slosh it all out. Worse, getting yourself cratered into bits by an enemy will give them the chance to sponge up your precious cargo for themselves.
Some strategies begin to form. In these competitive matches, you’re going to want to coordinate roles; otherwise, you’re bound to end up as a bunch of isolated, decorative rubble piles. Are you going to have one quarterback-built behemoth who’ll move like a Centrelink waiting line but can hold a tsunami of the sloshy stuff? Or would it be better to enlist two mid-size water boys branching out along the wings of the map while two faster pottery pieces run interference, defence (or possibly sapper-like distraction) through the centre?
And we haven’t even gotten to the cleverest and most game-changing mechanic of Kiln, its actual shape-crafting pottery, which will determine your pot’s main perk, or special power, in real time. I’m talking serious stuff on a cooldown timer, which will dramatically alter the flow of any fight.
Let me make the concept live for you in an anecdote. I glance over at my mate Pete’s screen and watch as he uses the sticks on his controller to make some on-screen “ghost mitts” mould clay on a pottery spinner. He’s been given an impressive degree of control here. His chosen clay, which comes rated as either hard, medium, or soft, gets massaged into a variety of classic forms: bowls, cups, vases, and many weirder, more phallic things in between.
Confession: I’m briefly tempted to queue up “Unchained Melody” on my phone and recreate with him the scene from Ghost, where I’m the Swayze to his Moore. He clicks through too fast; opportunity lost.
Something I won’t regret to the end of my days is how much fun my team and I had in the matches that followed. Using a chalice I’ve made that’s worthy of the king of kings, I shredded through the lesser ceramics arrayed against me with my unique hurricane power-up. When the enemies get wise to that ability, I shift form into an hourglass-shaped pottery piece, which, natch, comes with an hourglass perk that slows down time for my foes.
The opening frenetic fisticuffs of Kiln are mindlessly amusing for the first few lives. Still, everything gets way more interesting when actual strategies start to form, and basic bloodlust gives way to playing the objective. Controlling the mid-map water jars becomes key, as is coordinating the use of our special moves, some of which stun-lock defenders and allow attackers to get through or block lanes with excess clay barricades.
Basically, Kiln is equal parts clever, tactical, and, as all pottery ought to be, pleasing to look at with its cartoony aesthetic. The jury is out on how entertaining this can be on one’s lonesome, because I think only the tightest pottery posse will prevail online. That being said, I can honestly say that the blueprint for a smart, smashing good time exists here. This year’s release list for games is densely populated, but it’d be a mistake to let your eyes glaze over Kiln.
Kiln releases April 24, 2026, on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.
