I’m happy to report that I have matured since my days of playing Halo 2 online. My brother and I would stay up deep into the night on weekends swapping turns. We played so much that our mom bought us a pet pillow for large dogs (something like $10 on Craigslist) that we could both lay down on and not complain about sore elbows in the morning.
But those lobbies were, to put it mildly, heated. The mix of adolescence, trying to prove or assert masculinity, and boldly claiming you landed a 360 no-scope is a younger man’s game, one that most of us have left behind. Since then, my online multiplayer gaming has gotten much more tame.
As much as I still enjoy a round or two in a sweaty FPS match, I’m too unbothered to really keep up. Battlefield, Fortnite, Call of Duty: Warzone has done away with most of the fun I had—infinitely queuing up matches over twenty years ago in exchange for meager XP gains to inch toward the next rung on a battle pass. I’ve been ready to play something more in line with my greying temples and well-rounded dad bod. Leave all that other stuff for the kids who don’t need sleep. I’m settling into my filthy casual years.
Kiln’s debut at the Xbox Developer Showcase in January of this year looked exactly like the kind of multiplayer game I’ve been awaiting. Boasting a deep, meaningful character creation and firing your own ceramics in conjunction with quick, easy-to-learn battlefield mechanics makes for a strong appeal for someone who wants to add levity to their gaming. It’s not a perfect game, and I find it odd that it’s got a roadmap for the rest of the year, but the initial look is greatly more promising than underwhelming.
Booting up the game for the first time, you’re given just enough narrative to string everything together. Celadon is a goddess that encourages you, a little goober spirit with a whole lot of cake, to inhabit pots and then to use those pots to go and crush your enemies. There’s not much else to it, and frankly, I didn’t find myself asking any questions. Adorable little guy, make pots, smash, smash, smash. It’s not rocket science.
Rather, there’s an art to Kiln. Each pot you handcraft on a virtual potter’s wheel, which is immensely satisfying. Initially, you’re locked into only making medium pots; however, there are eight or so different vessels, which equate to classes within just the medium tier. Until you’ve leveled up a few times in matches, you’ll be experimenting with what the medium ceramics are, so there is plenty of variety to figure out what kind of play style will suit you.
Soon, small and large tiers and their respective classes open up to you, and I found myself taking well over an hour just tinkering with different vessels. With something like twenty different classes between all the pot sizes, each with its own heavy attack, the customization has an immense breadth. For the seasoned competitive player, that does come at the cost of depth. Casual players will admire this, since it means that you’ll be spending less time figuring out how to actually play the class. Otherwise, controls are universal. The sprint consists of rolling; you’ve got a handful of light attacks, the unique heavy attack, and a jump.
The depth is in the decoration of your pots. In my time with Kiln, maybe 30 or 40 matches, you’ll quickly amass glazes, handles, lids, stickers, and studs with generous payouts when you level up. Already the decoration menus are several pages long, adding to my time on the potter’s wheel, where I’ve sat, feet flat on the ground, elbows on knees, leaning forward in the gamer’s pose, perfecting the angle at which I meticulously lower a freshly sponged vessel into a blue bowl that I’ve dubbed my “Ice Cream Champ.” It’s currently sitting on my top shelf, which functions as more than a proud display of my trophy pots.
The top shelf is essentially your bench in a match. You bring three pots into any battle, and while waiting for a respawn, you can select any of your on-deck vessels to swap in should you feel like you need an extra push, a shift in offense/defense, or maybe just to show off. This touch on its own is enough to prepare any player for whatever direction a fight may go. Additionally, though a bit time consuming, you can pull out the potter’s wheel in the respawn time and just craft a new pot from scratch if you think that will give you the edge.
What I conclude from this is that while Kiln is a straight-forward game, it has a degree of thoughtfulness to keep you playing matches. Despite the time sink in pottery decoration, matches are a breezy ten minutes at most, and queuing up a string of battles is slick.
The rules of pottery war are simple: douse your opponents’ kiln before they shut yours down. That’s not quite where the shared DNA with popular MOBAs ends, but it’s the point of divergence. Your squad of four will engage with bold map designs, such as placing both kilns side-by-side or hidden channels that only the small pots can zip through. Bottlenecks are thoughtfully placed but far from impossible to defend or skirt by. Environmental hazards dot the arenas but don’t command the flow of battle. Maps are well varied, designed around a theme that translates into a specific mechanic, and smartly made for strategizing. However, they’re open enough that a win can come down to skill and mastery of your pots.
One of the hangups is the way the currency, called chips, is handled. Now, it’s handing out much more per win or level up than most any live service game with a battle pass system will give you but less on how you spend it. You can buy all sorts of decorative items, but they’ll be limited. If you want to redo a pot, you’ll lose one use of mostly anything you’ve used to deck it out with. In the shop, you buy things in multiples of fives. If you’re playing with many people on one account, like I am with my kids, those uses disappear rapidly. Some items are unlimited, but they are few, and most players will tire of them quickly.
Gameplay is rock solid, though, but the maps and modes are in short supply, as interesting as they are. A new map is set to debut in week 2 after launch, with two more coming in the summer, which is a cadence that most other live service games fail to keep up with. At launch, there’s the one mode, which gets life with each match primarily from the maps. We’re slated to get more in the fall. It’s hard to gauge what kind of longevity there is, but really only time will prove if the play style and design will retain interest and maintain quick matchmaking times.
I mention this hesitation about Kiln’s future primarily to show some personal concern and step back from analyzing the game’s merits to plead the case that games like Kiln are the ones that will be treasured for the memories made over flash-in-the-pan Steam concurrent numbers. We need more games like Kiln that appeal to the quieter communities of competitive players.
I desperately wish it had a local co-op mode. My kids are already planning a party with their friends where they stay up late and pound Little Cesar’s and make pots and battle them. I could see that recurring more frequently if they didn’t have to depend on an internet connection or passing a single controller around the room, but rather a squad of them could hop in at once. Online multiplayer games live and die on their player base, and I hope that fellow parents, kids, or more casual players are bought into the Kiln experience since it prioritizes fun over grind.
Kiln is my Halo 2. It’s a stay-up-late, laugh-until-your-ribs-ache game, but for Gen Alpha. With its razor-sharp focus on fun, technicolor visuals, and chuckle-worthy humor, it’s a more mature version of the grating competition for bragging rights than the shooters from my childhood two generations ago.
It’s replaced angsty name-calling for impromptu dance battles, headshots for super splashes, and corner camping for limitless pottery customization. Kiln keeps calling me back to spin up the potter’s wheel and sculpt another victory out on the dance floor, in the basement concert, or wherever the gods’ whims take me.
