You’ve inherited an old hotel. Your job? Clean it up, win over the locals, and make sure it’s not haunted. Oh, and sing a musical number. Needless to say, There are No Ghosts at the Grand has a lot going on. But no ghosts. Or so you’re told.
Indie developer Friday Sundae has created a little game with a lot of variety. In my 30 minute demo, I went hands-on with a number of mechanics, including repairing, driving, puzzle-solving, and ghost-busting. And I’m sure there will be even more in the full game. So let’s enter this Grand Hotel and see what we uncover, shall we?
My first surprise is that There Are No Ghosts at the Grand has a sense of humor. Fans of dad jokes (as I am) will feel welcomed. Your trusty hotel-repairing-multi-tool has a personality of its own. Robert C. McBrushy, a paint brush avatar who speaks in a Scottish brogue, asks my character if he’d like the tutorial.
It’s a bit of meta-humor that seemingly breaks the fourth wall. But we’re playing a character who’s new to hotel management, so it makes sense in-universe as well. Our hero protests, but McBrushy insists. And I’m glad he does, since our tools have a variety of functions.
There Are No Ghosts at the Grand, But There is Debris
Essentially, fixing up the hotel boils down to using the right tool for the right job. Use the vacuum to suck up debris, the paint tool to paint the walls, the furniture rearranger to- you get the picture (and put it on the wall, heheh).
If a decorating sim does not sound like your cup of tea, the game makes it pretty intuitive and responsive. You won’t run into a problem where the game tells you to gather up an unknown quantity and you can’t find the last shard of a broken Ming vase, or what have you.
This is because scanning highlights each object with a color that coordinates with the tool you’ll need, and tells you the percentage towards completion. While repairing a boat’s crane later on I thought I had assembled it. But the 67% percent said otherwise. So scanning showed me a piece I had missed, thinking it was a part of the dock.
The vacuum and painting are pretty much point-and-shoot, but what about when you have to move furniture? I figured Ghosts would commit the puzzle-game cardinal sin of having a solution fail to register since you didn’t rotate a Windsor chair 97 degrees, only 96.
But Ghosts snaps objects into place if you’re close enough. And when you do have to pivot that sofa a bit, the game confirms when you’ve got it with the object going from red to green. Hanging pictures proves a bit wonky—I have to place them slightly through the wall—so at least the color confirmation helps with that.
Who Ya Gonna Call?
Midway through repairing the hotel, I receive a call from someone named Maddie Green. The demo seems to take place towards the beginning of the game but not right at the start. So I could piece together that Miss Green had met me before and had mixed feelings.
I would learn that since I, a meddling American, inherited this old British hotel and came to check it out, she felt I should leave it well enough alone. I got a bit of a Hallmark movie vibe here. But as I said, there’s a lot going on. The pressing mission is that Maddie wants to investigate an island, which is host to some disturbance. Again, that seems like something encountered prior to the demo.
Interestingly enough, her call comes partway through my renovations. So in deciding to meet with Maddie to investigate, I put the renovations on hold, to McBrushy’s chagrin. It seems like Ghosts will let you have some say in how much renovating you wish to do. Or at least when you want to do it.
Just Sit Right Back and You’ll Hear a Tale
So I shirk my duties and hop on Maddie’s bike along with her cat. I expect a cutscene. But no, I’m treated to a driving mini-game. It’s pretty straightforward but the game also provides “checkpoints” of sorts—little yellow lights to drive through so I know where I’m headed. It doesn’t feel essential for navigating to the coast on the bike, but the waypoints prove helpful when I’m driving a boat around the shoals to the island.
And what’s a boat without a good shanty? Or at least a nice folk-pop song. I wondered when the “musical” element would come into play. Music in the game is both diegetic and non-diegetic. In choosing a dialogue option with Maddie, I went into a full number straight out of a Broadway musical.
The boat doesn’t dock at the island so much as dock into it. So McBrushy says, “It looks like you’re about to renovate a boat, would you like some help with that.” The character does feel a bit like a Scottish spoof of Clippy from the old Microsoft Office, for those of you who remember the tools of a bygone era.
It’s also worth mentioning here that the renovation mechanics also come into play away from the Grand. After fixing the boat, it drifts away. So marooned on the island I have to find shelter. An old bunker will do, but let’s spruce it up? Here I’m introduced to a new tool: a furniture-creator which means I won’t have to sleep on the floor.
Less Scary, More Spooky
As it’s getting dark, the spooky sci-fi elements come out to play. The cat also begins talking here. That feels important to mention. There are no ghosts at the Grand, but then again, as Maddie points out, we’re not at the grand.
Thankfully, the first ghosts are more like residual memories. There’s an anomaly of flashbacks from when the bunker was in use during WWII. I use the furniture mover to align objects in the memory to play the whole flashback. The flashback shows people using radio signals stumbling upon something they shouldn’t.
At this point the “horror” comes in, if you’d call it that. I say this because the game is more spooky than scary. I find myself attacked by armchair spiders. That is to say, armchairs that turn into spiders—not amateur arachnids.
I had a little bit of difficulty with the controls so it took a bit to switch to the blaster. And in so doing I realized that it doesn’t seem like I can die. Normally that would reduce the scare factor, but again, I don’t think There Are No Ghosts at the Grand is going for scary. Eventually Robert McBrushy tells me to just book it back the bunker, and I oblige. The bunker door comes to a close along with the demo.
There Are No Ghosts at the Grand Overall Impressions
All in all, I’m intrigued to see more of There Are No Ghosts at the Grand. The demo provided a good sense of the various aspects of the game from fixer-up mechanics and driving to puzzles and combat.
That said, it did lean the most on the renovation simulation. I’m definitely curious to get more of the ghost-busting gameplay and see what it’s like to talk (and sing) with more characters. The voice acting I heard so far is top notch—as one would hope from a game in which music plays a big part.
I will say, the movements of the character models are a bit odd. Namely, the way their eyes and heads flit around. But this is something that I imagine may get fixed. I also will mention I did not expect fully rendered 3D models in this kind of indie game. Friday Sundae outdid themselves in the overall design, and I’m also curious to see the whole town they built.
Lastly, though I touched on this before, I think it is important to clock how spooky this game may or may not be. As something of a horror sicko myself, I wouldn’t have minded a cozy indie game that pulls a bait-and-switch into nightmare fuel. I love that.
But! There are games like that already. I can also appreciate a title that caters to people who want cozier spooky vibes for Halloween. It’s why Halloweentown is such a cult classic. I could easily see There Are No Ghosts at the Grand becoming a Halloween hit for scaredy-cats as well as families who want something everyone can enjoy for the holiday.
Spend Halloween at the Grand
And you can in fact celebrate Halloween with a short stay at the Grand yourself. The demo of There Are No Ghosts at the Grand will debut on Halloween. As we await for a full… Grand opening, you can wishlist the game here. There Are No Ghosts at the Grand will debut for Xbox and PC at a future date.
