The baffling trailer for There Are No Ghosts At The Grand, some kind of supernatural mystery/ home renovation/ musical game, has stuck with me since I saw it back in June. The game has a Steam demo out now, and though it’s just a brief look, I was pleasantly surprised by how well all those disparate genres fit together.
You play as a man named Chris David, who inherits a hotel called The Grand from his missing father. During the day you renovate the hotel, and at night you investigate a mystery involving monsters, a talking cat, and different characters with connections to different rooms of the hotel. In addition to all that, characters sometimes break into song, with your dialogue choices becoming part of the lyrics.
I did not, alas, see the hot priest from the trailer above in the demo, but I did get a sense of how all the game’s different bits play. When the demo opens, you use a gun-like tool to fix up a room of the hotel: vacuuming debris, righting furniture, and blasting off wallpaper and replacing it with paint. The renovation mechanic isn’t super-detailed–you only have to paint a bit of a wall before it gets fully coated, for instance–but it felt nicely forgiving after how much time I’ve spent painstakingly blasting nooks and crannies in Power Wash Simulator 2 lately.
Your renovations get interrupted by a woman named Maddie, who wants your help investigating some black slime that’s washed up on the town’s beach. Here your renovation tool serves a different function, letting you move pieces around to repair a boat. Once we set sail, as I followed waypoints toward an abandoned island, I noticed the soundtrack had gotten unusually loud. When I turned my head, I realized the music was coming from Maddie, who was singing an upbeat pop number about the situation in town.
I don’t know if there’s some moment in the full game that explains why characters spontaneously burst into song, but the whole thing was so disarmingly weird that I forgot all about steering the boat while I gaped. Like the trailer song, Maddie’s song was super-catchy; at the end of it, I chose between dialogue options to add a funk-inflected verse sung by Chris that included the lyric “I’m not some venture capitalist.” Creative director Anil Glendinning told Polygon There Are No Ghosts At The Grand becoming a musical was “a little bit unexpected… as it was just because of the music we were listening to at the time,” which included “[a] lot of music from the British scene around the late ‘80s, early ‘90s.” As a musical theater nerd, the idea that the game is a musical just because sounds great to me, and while what I experienced of it was definitely jarring, I was totally delighted by it.
On the island, the supernatural stuff kicks in, and while I won’t spoil it, it was both an interesting mystery and mechanically appropriate to the idea of home renovation. Your renovation tool has different functions, such as switching the mode on the vacuum to fire stuff back out in order to repair things or place objects. Everything being done through your tool helps the game’s different pieces feel connected and keeps the demo from feeling too busy. The challenges and puzzles I faced on the island were pretty basic, and at times things even felt a little too hand-holdy, but I appreciated the guidance when being dropped in the middle of the game.
The demo lasts about 40 minutes, and it basically feels like that reveal trailer: an interesting kind of weird, but one that hasn’t come down on the side of good weird or bad weird yet. I wasn’t completely sold on the demo’s humor, which could feel a little try-hard, but the whole thing felt surprisingly cohesive and very charming. I’m psyched that it’s a musical because everything should be musicals, and I’m really curious to see if that part holds up. There Are No Ghosts At The Grand is set to release for PC and Xbox in 2026.
