Null Games and game studio Friday Sundae unveiled a musical mystery adventure game called There Are No Ghosts At The Grand.
The game debuted at the Xbox showcase today during the week of the Summer Game Fest.
Anil Glendenning, creative director at Friday Sundae, said in a press briefing that the game is a cozy, spooky, musical mystery.
The game is set in England, where a young American man, Chris David, finds out that his real father left her a delapidated hotel on the east coast of England in his will — from a father that Chris never met. The hotel has been in the family for generations, and it comes with an eccentric caretaker who has been around for a long time.
As the new owner, you have to renovate the hotel. Your father was renovating the hotel when he disappeared. You have his power tools and can pick up where he left off. Yet as you look into things, you find there is something mysterious going on. People such as servants give you advice, and you have to consider whether to trust them.
“This is the debut game from Friday Sundae as a studio,” Glendenning said.
It’s a first-person, narrative driven game with a unique blend of genres. In the game, you’re going to renovate and restore a spooky old hotel using a variety of exaggerated power tools, moving from room to room, discovering clues to unlock the secrets within.
“But this isn’t this isn’t a simulation game or a roguelike. It’s a single-player story game with depth, heart and humor,” Glendenning said. “The decorating is fast, fluid and fun, and the story is full of choices. It’s also a musical but not a traditional one.”
Chris sets about restoring the hotel, but finds he has only 30 days and 30 nights to complete the job because something is wrong under the surface. Glendenning said it’s a “compelling supernatural mystery full of secrets,” including those that the player character, Chris, hides from the player.
“You see, (Chris) does things off camera when you’re not controlling him. He hides things from the screen, almost as if he knows you’re watching,” Glendenning said. “Players should treat him like an unreliable narrator. Don’t trust him, and don’t trust it when people say to you, there are no ghosts at the Grand.”
Renovations can only be done during the day. You can use various power tools like a sand blaster, paint sprayer, a furniture cannon and a daisy chain gun.
“You get to shoot out cracked windows and explode old furniture, strip wallpaper off and spray it down with a coat of glossy new paint. You get to shoot chairs and tables, clean across the room with a furniture cannon, or, you know, take on the garden with a daisy chain gun to plant flowers, remove weeds, manage the grass and even trim the papyri,” Glendenning said.
“We want players to feel like a cross between Mary Poppins and Marcus Fenix,” Glendenning said. “And in every new room you complete, you’ll unlock new secrets and new characters.”
The game is about the “people and the baggage they leave behind. You meet each of our game’s characters as you delve deeper into the hotel. Each person is a custodian of a particular room that you can unlock. Colin, for instance, the elderly caretaker, can often be found at the hotel’s lounge. He’s a war veteran and the keeper of family secrets. His daughter, Lily, on the other hand, can be found in the greenhouse and kitchen gardens, complaining about the town and trying to escape.”
Then there is the hotel’s cat, Mr. Bones the Bastard.
“Each unique character that you meet can tell you about the history of the hotel and their personal connection to it,” Glendenning said.
As for the music, Glendenning said there are songs with bite in them, like punk song’s from the 1980s. Firday Sundae created the original songs that are performed by a band the studio created, The Concierge.
When you vacuum old debris in the hotel, you can uncover old newspaper stories and many other fragments. You can find secret passageways, piece together information on a crime board, discover hidden rooms in blueprints, and solve light environmental puzzles. It takes place in a fictional seaside town called Kingswood On Sea, which is a small open world around the hotel. You can walk its winding cobblestone streets and view its quaint, crumbling shops and its forgotten beachfront.
“Players will find an old fishing boat. You can renovate it, take it out on the shallow coastal waters and explore the hidden coves and sunken bays of Kingswood On Sea,” Glendenning said. “Players will even find on board a winch which they can use to dredge for things lost. They can follow treasure maps that they can find in the hotel during renovation and fish up more clues, notes, rumors and even quests deep from the ocean depths.”
You can explore places in the town like an abandoned mini golf course, and you can do side missions like odd jobs for odd people.
“Don’t stay out too late, because if you do, you might just come face to face with things altogether more unpleasant that lurk in the hotel and things that crawl and slither up the beach and cliffs leaving multi-legged footprints trailing back to the dark ocean waves,” Glendenning said.
I asked about the inspiration for the game. Glendenning said, “We love ghost stories. We love spooky stories. And we were always asking ourselves, ‘What is a relatable scary story? What is a relatable spooky story? And one of the things that kept coming back to us is that first day you spend in a new house or a new apartment, and you’re decorating and you’re putting your furniture out, and it feels great, it feels cozy. And then night falls and you’ve got to leave this coziness and find your way to a bathroom down a dark corridor, and all of a sudden that cozy shifts to creepy. And it can happen in an instant, and that feeling of being alone in the empty building, that feeling that we sometimes get just in our own office building that’s 400 years old, that’s something that we wanted to capture here.”
At the same time, as fans of Luigi’s Mansion and Animal Crossing, the team wanted to create something that straddled that gap between cozy and creepy, and really contrasted those two things, he said.
As for advice for the player, Glendenning said, “Our recommendation is to explore every nook and cranny of the hotel, uncover every secret passageway and every secret door, put all of those scraps of paper on your crime board, and try and figure out the mystery before your time is up, because you’re really going to want those tools by the time whatever is rising reaches you.”
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