Kiln review

Double Fine’s Kiln is the most confounding, irritating, and frustrating game I’ve played all year. Don’t be fooled by its endearing whimsy and beautiful aesthetic. It’s smooth around the edges but completely rough inside. I would never consider Double Fine incompetent, but Kiln is a clumsy, amateurish multiplayer mess.

In Kiln, you control a spirit, which is the being that inhabits each pot you create. You take your super-powered creations and drop them into Greek-themed combat maps (because pots, hehe) with the goal to squelch the opponents' Kiln. This is the kind of game we’ve been craving; it’s fresh, it’s innovative. But it plays worse than a Nintendo DS game over the old Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.

The netcode is inexcusable. It’s atrocious. In every match, it felt like Neo trying to fight Agent Smith through a 56K connection—over Wi-Fi. I’m not exaggerating. Every. Single. Match. If it wasn’t players jittering around the map, it was hit detection delays, or attacks whiffing because the opponent wasn’t there anymore. It’s not uncommon to hear pots clank together, but nothing happens. The game is constantly gaslighting you. It’s so bad, I can’t imagine what this game would feel like if it were taken offline and we fought bots. There’s no sense of control.

In the menu, there’s a section for tips that weirdly only contains combat tips. One tip reads “Special Abilities take priority over Attacks. Use them to counter-attack, or escape!” It doesn’t work consistently. The netcode won’t allow it. I created a pot that drills underground and pops back up to damage an enemy. I can’t count the number of times I used that move directly under an opponent, and you see their bodies react to the contact, but their health doesn’t budge. I would mash a special against a relentless fast-attacking pot, but somehow they got their attack in first; now I’m stun-locked. You get to a point where you choose a pot that has a special attack that works despite the netcode.

Massive chalices have it the worst. They lumber their gigantic ceramic bodies to take space and hit hard (the sound effects for the pots are excellent), but smaller pots can easily beat them up thanks to their speedy attacks. But as the poor netcode would have it, the big pots could have the advantage because the game can’t keep up with the smaller pots’ speed. It’s a game of Whack-a-Mole you can’t win.

I have Fiber internet—1GB up and down. I made sure it wasn’t me. I tried resetting my Xbox Series X’s cache, restarting my router, trying a different ethernet cable, confirming my NAT type was open, changing my DNS settings, speedtests, playing at different times of day, playing while my wife wasn’t working, you name it. Everything on my end was working. It is, without a shadow of doubt, a problem on Double Fine’s end.

This is a game parented by a company whose children include Call of Duty, Blizzard, Turn 10, Playground, and Halo Studios—all companies with functional online infrastructure. None of them could help? It’s so bad it feels like Double Fine just released this game to get it off their plate so they can put more focus on whatever’s next. It’s truly baffling.

I wish I could say that if they fixed the netcode, it would be a fantastic game. But the battle mode, called Quench, isn’t balanced. Respawns are as fast as a MOBA stuck in the early game, so winning fights is hardly important. If you do take fights, you’re almost always punished for doing so because other pots just roll by and splash your Kiln. Or you could roll your pot out of a fight, beeline for the Kiln, and get some squirts in. It’s best to keep a pot back to protect your Kiln, but no one wants to sit there the whole game waiting for action, and I don’t blame them. Pots don’t have roles, either; they just have varying levels of health, water, and body size. There’s no structure.

Maps exacerbate the respawn problems, too. The map themed after Anubis is the worst culprit. There’s a middle island that separates the opposing Kilns, and platforms that hover above the abyss and slowly float around the island. You could team-wipe your opponent, but if a platform isn’t close enough, you have to wait to cross, which only gives your opponent time to respawn and fight you again. And who knows how that fight may go with the netcode muddying the gameplay.

Kiln doesn’t need to be reworked to be some hyper-competitive game. The bones of a silly party game are there, but there has to be a logical balance that enables strategic play. Minute-to-Win-It games aren’t less of a party game because you can employ strategy. The challenge is strategizing in a very short time. It wouldn’t be fun if it were Five-Minutes-to-Win-It. You can strategize Mario Party minigames games, even though many of them have random elements, but they all have clear rules that reward players for playing within them properly. Kiln completely misses that.

What’s most unfortunate is how much creating pots is only a means to an end. It’s easily my favorite part of the game. You feel like you're sitting at the wheel—just you and your clay. It's relaxing, creative, and wondrous. There’s an achievement (it’s not secret) where you have to create one pot of each archetype. That’s 24 pots. I had so much fun stretching, pulling, squishing, pinching, shaping, cutting, and pushing clay around that I ended up creating over 48, completing another achievement. I’d see other people’s creations while waiting for a match to start and wonder how they achieved their particular glaze (paint) pattern or the shape of their pots. The creative potential seems limitless.

It’s just too bad there’s no other reason to create pots besides battling. Want more decorations? You have to play multiplayer to earn currency. That’s the whole game—make a pot, fight, buy things to decorate a new pot. I wish there were more incentives to make beautiful pots. I’m not sure screenshotting your creations and posting them to social media is enough.

I’ll say this in defense of Kiln’s irrefutable whimsy: I can appreciate how Double Fine commits to a bit. If you decide to play this, you’ll immediately notice an off-putting fascination with butts. Now, listen to the opening of the overworld music. I swear it’s a note away from being exactly how Sisqo sings “Let me see that thong” in “Thong Song.” You can’t unhear it.