Lucy recommends: There Are No Ghosts at the Grand

Happy Friday!

It's the big one for us video game enjoyers next week: Steam Next Fest, where hundreds, if not thousands, of demos will be available to play in a week long celebration of upcoming games. I'll have plenty of recommendations for you, so keep your eyes peeled on your inboxes.

This week, I'm very excited to talk about There Are No Ghosts at the Grand, a game I've been keeping a close eye on since it was revealed at 2025's Xbox Summer Showcase. A mix of home decorating and ghost busting with a few musical numbers thrown in for good measure? Sign me up!

There's a new demo out today and if you're diving in: something may or may not be within this newsletter that'll net you some cool in-game goodies. Keep reading for more info on that!

🎁 But before we jump in!

Paid LFG Supporters get bonus newsletters and the chance to enter into giveaways! This week, I've got five copies of over the hill to give away on Steam and a TOEM 2 gift box that includes an Instax Mini 13 camera! Due to postage restrictions, the winner of the TOEM giveaway needs to reside in the continental US (sorry, international folk!). Head to the #giveaway channel in the Discord, you have until 1:30 PM PT on Sunday October 18 to enter, good luck!

If you'd like to upgrade to a paid Supporter role, hit the button below!

What is There Are No Ghosts at the Grand?

You're a home renovator by day and ghost hunter by night.

When American Chris David unwittingly inherits a crumbling British hotel, he has thirty days and nights to get it ship shape again. The Grand hides many secrets, and if he doesn't get to the bottom of them in time, something terrible is going to happen. Chris can renovate rooms using his trusty power tools, and these same tools can help him out when the ghosts at The Grand awaken in the evenings. Pootle around, meet the townsfolk, and try and help out where you can. Oh, and it's also a musical.

What's the gameplay loop of There Are No Ghosts at the Grand?

🧹 Clean up the grubby Grand by day using your all-in-one power tool that comes loaded with its own helpful assistant, Robert C. MacBrushy (impeccably voiced by The Lord of the Rings' Billy Boyd). Use the tool to vacuum dust and blast furniture into bits as you clean up the hotel

🪑 Then, use the tool to redecorate. Pick your paint swatches and floor coverings, place furniture in the right spots, then use the chain gun mode to add your finishing touches. Unlike games like PowerWash Simulator, you don't have to hit every nook and cranny 100% to finish decorating, which keeps the pacing moving. Which is just as well, because the local town also needs a bit of a once-over

👻 That's just by day! The Grand and the sleepy seaside town of Kingswood-on-Sea have a lot of history, and some of it comes out to play at night. Use your power tools in unexpected ways to pass by the local poltergeists

🎶 The game is a love letter to the UK, and to musicals. During musical numbers, rhythm sections will appear on screen, so get ready to get your boogie on

Who's making There Are No Ghosts at the Grand?

There Are No Ghosts at the Grand is being made by British studio Friday Sundae, a team of ten headed up by husband and wife team Anil and Rachel Glendinning. They've been working on the game for about three years.

Try There Are No Ghosts at the Grand yourself!

As I mentioned up top, I've got a little surprise for you if you play the demo for There Are No Ghosts at the Grand! As I was chatting with the lovely team at developer Friday Sundae about this feature, they suggested adding a code in this newsletter to use in-game to unlock some extra goodies. You may remember that the team behind The Granny Detective Society did something similar. I loved the idea, and can officially reveal that the code to input is... 🥁

2423

And if you're here from the in-game clue, welcome! If you like indie games, I hope you'll stick around 🥳 Thanks again, Anil, Rachel, and co.!

Why There Are No Ghosts at the Grand rules

Regular LFG readers will notice that I'm doing something a little different with this section/the Q&A. I was inspired by friend of the newsletter George Osborn and how he formatted this interview with Chris Kerr. It gets to the best quotes more quickly, and gives me ample opportunity to add more puns in. I'll send the full transcript to paid LFG Supporters a little later.

Let me know what you think, we've got comments now! Make sure to follow George and now Chris as he embarks on his exciting new venture!

I caught up with Anil and Rachel to chat about musicals, ghost story inspirations, and the game's upcoming Early Access.

I ain't afraid of no ghost (story): The idea for No Ghosts at the Grand came from the team at Friday Sundae just wanting to tell a good story set in the UK. "There is a very British way of telling a ghost story and it is very much to do with heritage: family, legacy, and history, rather than perhaps other cultures where it may be about literal spirits or alternate worlds and that kind of thing," Anil tells me. "This is not so much a story about ghosts as it is about places and about memories and about experiences." Rachel and Anil cite authors like Dennis Wheatley and Stephen King as huge inspirations, both masters of taking the mundane and making it terrifying. For Friday Sundae, they wrote what they knew: the idiosyncrasies of the UK, mixing ghost stories they heard when visiting creepy old estates (Rachel calls out Tyntesfield House, in particular), with the mundanity of a British seaside town. As a Brit, Kingswood-on-Sea feels authentic: complete with recognizable (but legally distinct) logos and ephemera, comforting accents and turns of phrase. The studio's artists used their local surroundings to really nail that authenticity, and it shows: the biggest compliment I can give No Ghosts at the Grand is that it made me feel a little homesick for a place I'd never been. (Although experiencing it through an American character's eyes, I think I can finally understand why other countries think we're flat out weird.)

Grand designs: "If you think about games like Gone Home or Firewatch or What Remains of Edith Finch, I think before the location and before the game mechanics, the storyline came first," Anil tells me. "It was very much the same with us. We had a story that we wanted to tell and then the renovation mechanics came in afterwards. [...] We wanted things that matched the story and worked organically with that. Had the cleaning genre not existed, we would have invented it for this game, but we were fortunate that there was already a market out there." As an avid player of PowerWash Simulator myself, I know the pain only too well of walking around a room, desperately scouring the objects to find that final 1% of grime to clean so I can hear a "ping!" and be on to the next job. No Ghosts at the Grand luckily takes a more arcade-y approach to its renovating and cleaning. A wall doesn't have to be 100% painted for it to count towards your progress, and for a game that puts a lot of emphasis on story and characters, it makes sense to push you forward to the next beat. Locations are also tied to stories as well as the game's quirky cast of characters, and they all have strong opinions about Chris, his unexpected inheritance, and his renovating. As a player, I'm more invested in those areas and more determined to do the best I can because of the characters, but also because I'm desperate to find out what's going to happen next. As Anil notes, "If it's a really exciting moment, not even the most ardent PowerWash fan is going to want to sit around."

The show must go on: Games can and do have incredible memorable moments backed by iconic pieces of music. Think crossing into Mexico in Red Dead Redemption, or burning fields in Far Cry 3. But characters bursting into song mid-conversation? That's something else entirely. I'll admit, I had a little trepidation going into No Ghosts at the Grand, but I'm pleased to say: I think the musical numbers really work. The songs are playful, self aware, and expository. By adding moments of interactivity, like playing the trumpet as another character sings, or interjecting with your own lyrics, it's quick to get swept up in the tunes. I always feel the same way when I watch a stage show: the first song always starts feeling a little awkward, but by the end, you're tapping your toes, along for the ride. According to Anil, in-game, that feeling is by design. "We were already dealing with a story that is surreal, where you are asked to question what the player is seeing and hearing. As soon as we had this character suddenly burst into the song, you were hit with that cognitive dissonance that you have within the first few minutes of musical theater when you're like, 'Okay, someone is singing on stage.' And at first, our character comments on it as well and you are left as a player for a little while to kind of ask yourself, 'Is this really happening? Is this something that's explainable within the game? Is this part of the genre?' We're being deliberately vague about that."

Headliners: No Ghosts at the Grand has a stacked cast for a studio's first project, with Billy Boyd, Tony-nominated Alex Brightman, and Ben Starr in leading roles. I asked Rachel and Anil how they secured such starring names, and the answer was: they simply asked. Turns out making a musical Lovecraftian horror comedy set in the UK is a very strong pitch indeed.

Checking out: There Are No Ghosts at the Grand hits early Early Access in December, and part of the reason is due to the game's structure. "The game has been written as chapters, kind of like three seasons of a TV show. Season one has a really strong narrative arc, then it sets up season two to go into quite a different direction after a short time time gap, and the same with season three. What we really wanted to do was to get this into players' hands as early as possible with season one ready to go with 20 missions and eight hours of gameplay."

'Til death do us part: Anil and Rachel have been together for over twenty years, and have worked together for the past six or so. Anil had the team hide some references in for Rachel, one of which being Chris' yellow scooter. "That's my yellow scooter from when I was 20," she tells me, "I used to go rambling in the countryside on this scooter. I used to go miles on it, so that is in the game." The game is full of references and memories, and as Rachel notes to Anil, "There is actually a lot of us, isn't there?" which I thought was just lovely.

Final thoughts: There Are No Ghosts at the Grand is an ambitious, cheerful genre mash up, niftily using various mechanics to tell a story that is unapologetically spooky and British. I'm excited to play the full thing: my The Sims and PowerWash senses are tingling.

Thanks so much for reading! Let me know what you think of the format tweaks, and I'll leave you with my just one more thing for the week, which is, of course, Biddy Blas. Scrib doon, my friends, scrib doon.