Double Fine has taken to the (virtual) stage at the Xbox Developer Direct showcase to reveal Kiln, a unique multiplayer, team-based party brawler, almost a decade after it was announced. The game first surfaced in 2017, emerging from Double Fine’s ‘Amnesia Fortnight’ event, an annual, two-week game jam that spawns prototype game ideas.
It has remained silent, aside from some prototype images appearing online years ago, until now. During the recent Xbox Dev Direct, Double Fine finally revealed the physics-based, destruction-laden brawler.
Kiln – Ten Years in the Making
If you try to find any information online about Kiln, you’ll find a blurb penned by Double Fine in April 2017:
Kiln is a multiplayer, team-based brawler by Derek Brand with a focus on creating unique player sculpted characters featuring crazy physics-based animation and destruction. In Kiln you play as a Mountain Spirit, supernatural beings forever at war on the summit. You’ll use an ancient pottery wheel to create warrior golems called Vessels, inhabiting them and enabling you to interact with the physical realm to do battle.
Created during the match, extremely diverse character shapes and sizes are possible each exhibiting unique attributes and controls that leverage the possibilities in procedural animation.
It was also in 2017 that Double Fine revealed the developers responsible for shaping the early game:
All of this was reshared by Double Fine during today’s announcement.
Today, during the Xbox Developer Direct, we saw how that game has evolved over the last decade.
The trailer opened up with Tim Schafer, the head of the studio at Double Fine, working on some pottery. That’s basically the core concept of Kiln. Players take clay characters and shape them into whatever they can imagine, taking them into destructive environments and smashing each other to pieces.
You take your pottery mechanisms, craft ‘pots’, and take those ceramic imaginations into multiplayer battles across entertaining, engaging maps built with the ‘spirit of creativity’.
Double Fine confirmed that Kiln is coming Spring 2026, and a closed beta will come soon.
Do you think Kiln looks like your kind of game? Let us know what you’re thinking on the Insider Gaming Discord server.
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Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
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