Played Grail
I was a big fan of Sokpop's previous games - they used to release a very small game every single month. Some of them, like Stacklands, ended up becoming full-sized titles. Their output was proof, I suppose, that you can constantly make loads of games on a fast schedule without AI if you are disciplined about reusing your resources. You can see their Steam developer page here. I think playing a lot of their games in a row can teach you a ton about scoping projects and reusing stuff. It's pretty cool!
However, they understandably quit moving at this breakneck speed at some point. The last few years have much fewer games, and in 2026 they've only released two. One, Mistlward, I didn't like very much - I bounced off it pretty quick. The next, Grail, is an online asynchronous multiplayer deckbuilding game where the deck engine is really all you control. The cards play themselves automatically one after the other from a shuffled stack.
I play a lot of deckbuilders, none particularly well. This one was... all right, I guess! I'm enjoying it, and I have found myself drawn back to it quite a lot this week.
My enjoyment of it is a little up-and-down. When you can't play the cards yourself, watching a bad deck fall flat on its face does feel worse than having a bad run in Slay the Spire. (To me, anyway. This is probably very much up to personal taste.) You can speed up the rate at which your cards play themselves... but if you have a bad deck, it's very easy to tell quite early in the match that you are going to lose, and no amount of sped-up play can really erase the sting of having to watch it all, and listen to all the sound effects involved in your loss playing at maximum speed. But if you do have a powerful "engine" running in your deck, then it's very satisfying to watch the engine work. There are a ton of synergies within the first character's ability set, and it's been enjoyable for me to experiment with them and build functioning engines for each.
I do feel that I am getting better at it, which is always the main thing I use to tell if it makes sense for me to keep playing something. If I'm struggling but getting better, then it's probably worth it for me to keep struggling for a bit. I always feel like my ability to speak about deckbuilders is limited by my low skill in this genre. Nevertheless, I keep whacking my head against it, and this one has, so far, been fun to whack my head against.
My main complaint is that it's taken me longer than expected to unlock additional characters... because I keep spending my "win currency" on opening chests on a battle pass??? The game has a battle pass of some kind, which feels really odd for this developer. I accidentally spent all my winnings opening chests and now I can't buy the buxom rabbit lady with all the food ability cards. My fault, for sure, but still!!
Anyway, if you like autobattlers and deckbuilders and roguelikes, you might want to check this one out. If these things make your skin crawl, I deeply understand why you'd want to stay away. This does feel a little bit like the distilled essence of What Indie Games Have Been Doing For the Last Decade...