Null Games and Game Studio Friday Sundae He revealed a mysterious musical adventure game called there are no Grand ghosts.
The game debuted at the Xbox Showcase today during the week of the summer game festival. Arrives in 2026.
Anil Glendenning, creative director of Friday Sundae, said in a press briefing that the game is a welcoming, spectral and musical mystery.
The game is set in England, where a young American, Chris David, discovers that her real father left her a delapidated hotel on the eastern coast of England in her will – by a father who has never met Chris. The hotel has been in the family for generations and is supplied with an eccentric custodian that has existed for a long time.
As a new owner, you have to renew the hotel. Your father was renewing the hotel when he disappeared. You have its electric tools and you can resume where she had interrupted. Yet while you look at things, find out that something mysterious is happening. People like servants give you advice and you have to consider whether to trust them.
“This is the debut game on Friday Sundae as a study,” said Glendenning.
It is a first -person game and led by the narration with a unique mixture of genres. In the game, you are about to renew and restore an old spectral hotel using a variety of exaggerated electrical tools, moving from one room to another, discovering clues to unlock the secrets inside.
“But this is not this a simulation game or a roguelike. It is a game of stories by player with depth, heart and humor,” said Glendenning. “The decoration is fast, fluid and fun and the story is full of choices. It is also a musical but not traditional.”
Chris intends to restore the hotel, but finds out that he is only 30 days and 30 nights to complete the work because something is wrong with the surface. Glendenning said it is a “compensating supernatural mystery full of secrets”, including those that the player’s character, Chris, hides from the player.
“See, (Chris) does things out of the camera when you are not checking it. He hides things from the screen, almost as if he knew you’re watching,” Glendenning said. “The players should treat him as an unreliable narrator. Don’t trust him, and don’t trust when people tell you, there are no grandesms in Grand.”
The renovation works can only be carried out during the day. You can use various electrical tools such as a sand blaster, paint sprayer, a furniture cannon and a margherita chain gun.
“You can shoot with cracked windows and explode old furniture, strip the background and spray it with a hand of new lucid paint. You can shoot chairs and tables, clean through the room with a furniture cannon or, you know, take the garden with a margherita chain gun to plant flowers, remove the weeds, manage the grass and even cut the papyrus,” Glendenning has said.
“We want players to feel like an intersection between Mary Poppins and Marcus Fenix,” said Glendenning. “And in every new room you complete, you will unlock new secrets and new characters.”
The game concerns “people and the luggage that leave behind. They meet each of the characters of our game while deepening in the hotel. Each person is a custodian of a particular room that you can unlock. Colin, for example, the elderly guardian, is often found in the hotel living room. On the city and trying to escape.”
Then there is the hotel cat, Mr. Bones the bastard.
“Each unique character you meet can tell you about the story of the hotel and their personal connection with it,” said Glendenning.
As for music, Glendenning said there are songs with bite in them, like’s punk song of the 80s. Firday Sundae has created the original songs that are performed by a band created by the study, The Concierge.
When you aspire old debris to the hotel, you can discover old stories of newspapers and many other fragments. You can find secret steps, put together information on a crime table, discover rooms hidden in projects and solve light environmental puzzles. It takes place in an imaginary sea city called Kingswood on Sea, which is a small open world around the hotel. You can walk with its winding cobblestones and see its characteristic and dilapidated shops and its forgotten promenade.
“The players will find an old fishing boat. You can renew it, pull it out on the shallow coastal waters and explore the hidden coves and the sinked bays of Kingswood at sea,” said Glendenning. “The players will even find on board a winch that they can use to drag lost things. They can follow treasure maps that can find in the hotel during renewal and fish more clues, notes, voices and even deep missions from the depths of the ocean.”
You can explore places in the city like an abandoned Mini Golf course and you can do secondary missions as strange jobs for strange people.
“Do not stay out too late, because if you do it, you could simply find yourself face to face with the completely more unpleasant things that hide in the hotel and things that crawl and slide up the beach and the cliffs leaving more legs that drag back to the dark ocean waves,” said Glendenning.
I asked for inspiration for the game. GlenderNenning Said, “We love ghost stories. We love spooky stories. And we were allways asking urselves, ‘What is a Relatable Scary Story? What is a Relatable Spooky Story? And one of the Things that Kept Coming Back to use is That First Day You Spend In a a New House or New Apartment, and You’re decoration and you’re putting your Furniture Out, and it Feels Great, It Feels Cozy.
At the same time, as a fan of Luigi’s Mansion and Animal Crossing, the team wanted to create something that was riding on that gap between welcoming and disturbing and really contrasted those two things, he said.
As for the advice for the player, Glendenning said: “Our recommendation is to explore every corner of the hotel, discover every secret passage and each secret door, put all those fragments of paper on your crime table and try to understand the mystery before your time has expired, because you will really want those tools at the moment they reach you.”
