Kiln is a lot cheaper as of today, and Double Fine isn’t being shy about the reason. The studio’s Bisque Update drops the Standard Edition to $7.99 and the Fired Up Edition to $9.99 across all major platforms, with additional price adjustments in certain regions, and the announcement says outright that now that Double Fine is independent again, Kiln purchases go directly toward keeping the studio alive. Double Fine returned to independence in July as part of the XBOX restructuring and laid off 23 employees about three weeks later.
The latest addition to the game itself is Daily Throw, a creative mode built around a new pedestal next to the wheels in the Wedge. Every day there’s a new prompt to build a pot against, and once you submit one, other players can hand out ribbons to their favorites while you do the same for theirs. Throwing a pot earns a modest amount of Chips and XP on its own, but the ribbons are where the real payout is, and your most successful past pots get saved to a personal gallery.
Being independent also means the servers are now player hosted, and that comes with some tradeoffs Double Fine is upfront about. Lobbies are now party based, so you and up to seven friends can share a lobby between matches, but you won’t normally see other players in the lobby unless you’ve partied up. The studio says it’s looking at ways to bring that back. Host migration is in as well, so if the host leaves, the level reloads and you should land back in the match after a moment. Full eight-player parties also unlock custom games, where you pick a mode (just Quench for now), a map, and the team makeup, including how many bots to throw in.
The rest of the update is mostly centered around progression. Weekly Quests cover both creative tasks on the wheel and Quench matches, the collection now holds up to 80 pots and scrolls instead of requiring clicks, and anything on your top shelf now shows up in the collection too. A new Pot Journal tracks every archetype for each pot size along with your individual stats per archetype, though it only starts counting from this update forward. There are two new maps in Poseidon’s Bubble Bath, a heavily vertical arena with Bubble Bouncers and a clam with a nasty bite between the two kilns, and Ra’s Sunshine Nursery, where rolling suns can knock your pot off the map. Ten new levels raise the cap to 60 with new attachments, stickers, and glazes along the way, and two decoration packs are out today: a Psychonauts 2 pack with 20 decorations for $1.99 and a free Sun & Surf pack with 22.
When I put Kiln on our list of top games to play in April, I said I loved the creativity behind it but had reservations about its staying power, since a PvP game like this lives or dies by whether the player base sticks around. Double Fine is pitching the new price as the moment to invite your friends onto the “bottlefield,” and it says the next update is already in the works with new ways to play and a new way to connect and save your account. The studio isn’t promising specifics beyond that, which it attributes to being back in what it calls the wild west of indie development.
