Kiln Review (Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 & PC)

To witness the shattered fragments of a precious clay bowl sprawl out over the battlefield is a bit like seeing your childhood friend take your beloved action figure, and then ruthlessly smashing it into pieces because it was better than theirs. In one moment, you could be gawping at your artwork, finessing each and every tiny detail—the shape, the feel, and the pattern. But in the next, you could be watching it get pummeled to a pulp by another reckless pottery enthusiast, not out of spite, but out of sheer rage and desperation. The point is, it doesn’t matter how hard you try to create art in Kiln, because the truth is, nobody cares about the details or the fine touches that make it pop. If it can douse fires and swagger water weight like a clay firehose, then you might just be in for a winner.

It’s best not to think of Kiln as a lovingly crafted pottery simulator — because honestly, it isn’t. Rather, you should view it as a ruthless sandbox PvP game in which the bullies of the playground pride themselves on destroying your precious toys. You can create your own works of art, true — but that isn’t the aim of the game. No, the objective here is to use your clay pots as makeshift water-flaunting battering rams to douse fires and, above all, obliterate other ceramic goodies on the battlefield. And if you think this sounds like a rather unusual idea for a video game — it is. But that’s Double Fine to a tee; kooky concepts is its bread and butter, apparently.

The idea behind Kiln is simple: use a pottery wheel to create ceramic plates, bowls, or other forms of shoddy crockery, and take them into battle to wage wars with other players. As one of these anthropomorphic pots, you, along with the other combatants in the field, have the primordial task of extinguishing opposing fires—an act that requires you to collect and harbor water, and venture out into the thick of the chaos to carefully douse the flames. There’s a little more to it than that, but you get the idea. You create a pot, cradle water, and douse (or stoke) other fires whilst mindlessly clashing and colliding with other clay jars and what have you. After that, you head back to The Wedge—a communal spot for players—where you can showcase your prized possessions and share ideas with other pottery giants between bouts. Simple, but effective.

Going by the details mentioned above, Kiln isn’t a massively difficult game to learn on the fly. And, to be fair, it isn’t. Once you learn the basics and come to terms with the fact that each pot has its own special purpose, the task of extinguishing a few fires becomes a bit of a doddle. And even when it doesn’t go to plan, you have other options to explore, whether it’s a new ceramic jar with a slender neck, or a portlier bowl that has more depth for transporting water across vast distances. It’s merely the case of experimenting with the clay wheel and figuring out which designs are better suited for your needs before chucking them into the fray.

While the gameplay doesn’t really change that much as you aimlessly descend into back to back battles via the primary PvP mode, Kiln does offer a huge variety of molds to craft, which in itself is a great feature. With a clay wheel at your disposal, you can create all sorts of blueprints, some of which are comical, some of which are sturdy enough to hold candles against your average Robot Wars build. And there’s a good amount to experiment with here, too, with a livery of designs and patterns, as well as a ton of creative ideas, all of which you can share and flaunt in The Wedge after running the gauntlet with friends.

Above all, there’s a silliness here that makes Kiln an absolute delight to work through. Granted, it doesn’t do much to reinvent the clay wheel as far as technical details go. That said, with a simple and easy hook to wrap your fingers around, it is a great game to jump into a play on the go. You don’t need to be a pottery guru to extinguish fires; you just need to know how to clash clay together to make, well, things. It doesn’t have to be perfect, and frankly, Kiln does a splendid job of reminding you of that fact at every available moment.

With a joyfully vibrant aesthetic and general sense of kookiness tucked behind its each and every fragment, Kiln shines bridge as a lovingly crafted, albeit slightly unreliably bolstered multiplayer experience with a lot to offer the casual PvP player. It might not offer a lot of replay value outside of the signature game mode, but with enough variety in the clay-shaping process, it does provide enough fodder for idle thumbs. Could it do with a little extra meat on the clay wheel? Yes. For what it’s worth, though, I’d say that there’s a solid PvP game in the making here. Here’s hoping that it finds more content to help flesh out its wheel in due course.

Verdict

Kiln takes the peaceful act of clay-based pottery to the extreme in an all-new multiplayer sandbox where PvP waxes creative wizardry and ruthless ceramic combat in a stupidly vibrant world of anthropomorphic fantasy. While it might not offer a lot of depth in its signature kiln-based mode, the game does, thankfully, offer a ton of neat details, including a vibrant livery of weird and wonderful ideas, a simple yet engaging gameplay hook that’s easy to swing into on the fly, and a jam-packed communal space for sharing designs of all shapes and sizes.

Given that there aren’t all that many games that stand adjacent to Kiln, I’d say that it does make for a fitting contender in the PvP space. It might not have that all-important evergreen quality, but who’s to say that it can’t latch onto fresh ideas in the near future? If it can add a little more clay to the wheel, then it should, with any luck, become one of the most enjoyable PvP titles of its kind. We’ll be crossing our fingers, regardless.