I Hope Double Fine Keeps Getting To Make Weird Games Forever

Xbox delivered the first big showcase of the year with its Developer Direct, and amid rumors that the event would highlight three of its most-anticipated games, there was plenty of speculation that it would also show off a secret fourth game as well. That speculation proved correct, as the showcase offered the first formal and lengthy preview of Kiln, the next game from Double Fine. The madcap party game is coming sometime this spring, and while we’ll have to see how it turns out, the presentation itself stood out as a testament to the qualities that make Double Fine so special in this industry.

This wasn’t quite a debut for Kiln, which has been known about and in development for years. In fact, the excellent Double Fine documentary Psychodyssey had an episode devoted to its Amnesia Fortnight, the internal game jam exercise where Double Fine has cooked up some of its greatest ideas. That episode happened to capture the birth of Kiln, years ago now, showing just how long it takes a game to go from inception to release.

(If you haven’t watched the sprawling documentary series yet, you certainly should. It’s quite simply one of the best deep-dives on game development, with all the humor and heart and human drama that comes with an intimate look inside a group of creative people.)

Kiln looks fun and quirky, with mechanically rich gameplay hooks centered around creativity and art. You build your own personalized piece of pottery using a robust-looking pottery wheel editor, and then race against an opposing team while carrying water to help douse the other team’s kiln. Meanwhile, of course, your opponents will be on the attack, striving to break your pots before they can reach their destination. Though simple enough to grasp, there’s a lot of strategy at play here, as you’ll need to manage what kind of pot you make, balancing its carrying capacity with its vulnerability. It’s the kind of idea that is hard to imagine coming from anyone but Double Fine.

This is especially meaningful coming less than a year after Keeper, a beautiful and introspective single-player game that I loved, and that made GameSpot’s top 10 games of 2025. In many ways that game was the polar opposite of the Kiln–a meditative single-player game to contrast with a rambunctious party game–but they share a common philosophy of play and creativity.

When Microsoft acquired Double Fine, it felt like a lifeline for a studio that had always struggled to balance its personality with the ever-shifting demands of the market. It was certainly presented this way in the documentary, in which studio head Tim Schafer seemed downright relieved that he no longer had to spend many of his working hours hustling to secure investment and keep the studio afloat. In an ideal world, Double Fine would be free to continue exploring its passions within its unique studio culture unimpeded. As the years have gone on and Microsoft has ramped up its amount of studio closures and layoffs, that hope has felt more urgent. Keeper was a breath of fresh air in part because it felt like reassurance that Double Fine had remained unspoiled by a tumultuous time for the industry.

“Coming in the current moment, as Microsoft struggles with its Xbox business and has just hiked the price of Game Pass, makes Keeper feel awkwardly timed,” I wrote in my Keeper review. “I couldn’t shake the feeling that Keeper feels like a remnant of an earlier time in Game Pass, when this was the best-case argument for the subscription service: A creative studio was given the freedom and backing to make something remarkably weird and self-assured, without compromises. Keeper feels like a passion project, personal and precious, even with the might of an entire studio and mega-publisher behind it. It made me wonder if we’re going to continue to see games like this coming from Microsoft. I hope so.”

Industry watchers have suggested that games like Keeper are not necessarily meant to drive purchases, but rather, to act as value-adds for the Game Pass service. As the industry bifurcates into mega-blockbusters and forever-games living alongside smaller indie titles, games like Keeper and Kiln are increasingly bizarre outliers: smaller, more personal games emerging from inside the cocoon of a massive mega-publisher machine. A strange concept that began as a game jam exercise has been given the time to flourish into something real and, in a few months, playable to the public. It seems as if Microsoft is less concerned with how well it sells and more in how it rounds out its Game Pass library and first-party release schedule. But the future of Game Pass seems anything but certain.

As a result, more than almost any other developer–and certainly more than any target of a big-budget acquisition that comes to mind–Double Fine has been allowed to continue being its quirky self, shielded from the howling winds of change by the sheer size of one of the largest companies on earth. I don’t know how long this is sustainable, and frankly, I’m afraid to ask. For now I’m just happy that one of my favorite developers is allowed to make games spilling over with its own personality. I hope it goes on forever.

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