Anil Glendenning is the creative director and leader of a small team at Friday Sundae that is creating a musical mystery adventure game called There Are No Ghosts At The Grand.
It’s set in an old English town where a young American, Chris David, finds out his real father left him a decaying hotel (The Grand) on the east coast of England in his will. David never met his father, but he goes to the hotel and learns it needs serious renovation. And what comes next is a spooky musical mystery.
I played the game at the Gamescom event last week in Cologne, Germany, and interviewed Glendenning about the origins of the game afterward. The title debuted at the Xbox showcase today during the week of the Summer Game Fest, and it’s coming in 2026.
In the single-player gameplay, you get to use a variety of cozy power tools to renovate and redecorate the hotel. It’s kind of got a BioShock control vibe, where you can pull out a sandblaster, vacuum, decorator and more. I think the power tools need a bit more work to make them truly satisfying, Powerwash style, but the story is intriguing, the imagery is beautiful and the novelty of the musical is very creative.
But the mystery also kicks in. People such as servants give you advice, and you have to consider whether to trust them. Even Chris, who sees the baggage his father left behind, is a kind of unreliable narrator who has his own secrets. So you don’t trust people when they say, “There are no ghosts at the Grand.”
I had a chance to try out some of the tools to clean up. And then I took a boat ride to a mysterious island that was spreading some oil into the environment. Accompanying me was one of the untrustworthy companions who was also a decent singer. I got stranded on the island and thenhad to make the place cozy for spending the night.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: Where did some of the roots come from, the inspiration?
Anil Glendenning: We started off just wanting to tell a ghost story. The more we got into that ghost story, discovering that ghost stories are about the past, about decay–when we started thinking about what the past means to us, what decay means to us, we were thinking about childhood. We were thinking about the towns we grew up in. If you’re my age you think about the late ‘80s and the early ‘90s. We started drawing inspiration musically, from television we would watch. We started drawing a lot of that into the game.
We knew the game was set in the U.K., and we wanted it to have a real sense of place, but not realism. More of a magical realism. There’s influences of Doctor Who and Hammer horror films, of the Clash and the Specials and the madness of a lot of the music in that period. Most important, there’s influences of some of the towns that we grew up in, which seemed so lively and vibrant in our childhood. Today shops are gone. Some are boarded up. Some have changed into different places. The past is like a ghost. That was the idea behind it.
We took inspiration from a lot of seaside towns in the U.K. British tourists fly abroad now on holidays, so many of these towns get less and less tourists. They’re full of huge fancy Victorian buildings that were once hotels, and they’ve been boarded up. It’s very spooky, very creepy. It felt like a natural place for us to set the game. You play as a young American man. We wanted to tell a bit of a fish out of water story. He comes to the U.K., but it’s not London or any famous historical location. It’s this weird spooky town full of eccentric locals. He never quite knows what’s going on or who he should trust.
GamesBeat: It sounds like a challenging idea to sell.
Glendenning: Since the beginning of time, getting an idea out there has always been one of the biggest challenges for creators. It’s difficult now. It’s always been difficult. We were very fortunate in that Xbox was an early believer in the project when we showed them early demos. We’ve had tremendous support from them. We’re publishing ourselves and funding ourselves, but–I’m not sure we’re directly part of ID@Xbox. We know all the different people within the departments. There’s a lot of crossover within that. But after seeing our demo Xbox invited us to be part of their showcase and at Gamescom. They saw something in it very early on. It wasn’t this formed early in the project, but they know their audience. As soon as it went out there in their showcase there was a lot of interest in the game. They were right to pick it out. We couldn’t have done this without them.
GamesBeat: Is it an exclusive?
Glendenning: No, it’s not. It’s coming to Game Pass on day one, which is wonderful for us, because it’ll give us access to a huge audience. We’re focusing on Xbox and PC right now. We want to deliver the best possible product for those gamers. As soon as we’re done with that we’re opening ourselves up to other platforms as well.
GamesBeat: Did you have to assemble the studio while developing the game?
Glendenning: The studio is relatively young, but we’d been floating around doing a bit of work for hire and recruiting people. We didn’t expect the project to take off. We worked on it in our spare time. We had this little kernel of an idea. But it suddenly developed wings. Now the whole studio–well, I say “whole studio,” but there’s only between seven and 10 of us. We’re a small team. But we’re all now completely focused on this game. We’re planning to release it late next year.
GamesBeat: Were the core mechanics something you always had in mind, or did that develop over time?
Glendenning: They sort of developed over time. We wanted a ghost story, but we didn’t just want you to walk around a haunted house. We wondered what we would do in a dilapidated, spooky, haunted hotel. It turned out that for most of us, we thought we would tidy the place up. We would turn some lights on and make it less scary. That’s what we thought about. What if your job was to make the haunted house less scary, to renovate it and decorate it?
At the same time we didn’t want it to be a simulation. We wanted it to be arcade-ey, to be fun. We created these surreal power tools. We inhabited it with an AI DIY assistant, who’s something of an enigma himself. The game is designed to make you ask questions. Where did these tools come from? Does this make any sense for a game that’s set in 2002? The answer is it doesn’t, but there are reasons behind it if you explore the game.
GamesBeat: The tools are interesting. It almost makes me think of Power Wash Simulator, blasting everything with water. How did you get to what players can and can’t do?
Glendenning: The power tools are the main way in which you interact with the world, but you’re not always doing the same things. When you’re in the confines of the hotel, in a particular room, your job is to decorate and renovate, and you have a lot of creative freedom to express yourself. Or you can just follow the main mission, which is to do a minimum number of renovations before you can move on. We want players to be able to do what they like.
But those same power tools can be used to clear blockages in the road, to renovate the front of shops, to help people with missions, to defend yourself, to solve environmental puzzles. The main way you interact with the world is through these tools. The tools evolve and grow and develop new powers as the game goes on, unlocking new areas of the game world, unlocking new tricks in the players’ repertoire. It’s very much like an evolving character with evolving powers as the game goes on.
Putting together our Gamescom demo was a challenge, because we had to find ways to very quickly onboard players with a variety of mechanics. Our DIY brushes–it’s helpful for that, telling you what you need to do. We have scanning and highlighting in the game world. We’re trying to make everything as diegetic as possible. But in the main game, many of these tools will be onboarded gradually. You start off with just the vacuum cleaner, and it can only do one thing. But even with that one thing you can discover a variety of different ways to use it. The vacuum cleaner can suck and blow. You can open and close doors from a distance. That may not seem useful to start, but later on it’s a useful trick. We create these tool sets and allow emergent gameplay to appear.
GamesBeat: Do you eventually wind up with four different tools?
Glendenning: Oh, you end up with more. I think in the Gamescom demo there were only four, but we currently have six, and we may have more worked into the full game with a variety of different actions to use in surprising ways. Sometimes things happen purely by accident, like when you discover that if you jump while using the vacuum cleaner to blow, you can propel yourself up a little higher. That was a bug at first, but we might keep it. We’ve found a bunch of things like that, being able to double jump or rocket jump to platform your way to stranger sections of the game. I won’t say too much, but we want players to discover creative ways to use these tools.
GamesBeat: Every tool can have some kind of ulterior purpose.
Glendenning: Absolutely. Some of them are explicit and some of them are hidden. We want players to discover. You may have seen in the demo that a lot of what we do is give you something that seems quite simple – just decorate this room – but before you know it, it spirals out into something much bigger, more complex, and more surprising. That’s true of everything in the game, from the characters to the tools, and certainly the story itself. There’s more under the surface than you might expect.
The demo is 30 minutes long. There’s a whole variety of gameplay. It ends with a kind of big twist ending, as all of these monsters suddenly start materializing after they were hidden in plain sight. I think that’s a great metaphor for the game. There’s a lot more under the surface than there might appear. We tried to express that in the trailer, but it’s easy to look at that and say, “This is just a renovation game.” Play the game for two minutes and you’ll discover that there’s depth underneath it, and the story will take you to some very strange places.
GamesBeat: Where is most of the remaining work? What are your resources going into?
Glendenning: We’re a small team, so we’re doing everything ourselves. We’re developing the game. We’re communicating with fans. We’re doing the marketing and attending these events. It’s exciting, but we’re extremely busy. Everything you’ve seen today was put together by just seven people. A lot of the artwork you saw in the game was from just two artists.
There’s different problems for different people. With triple-A games players expect a high level of quality and content. With these big budgets and big teams–people are only human at the end of the day. Often your creative team, even in a large company, is still quite small. It’s a real challenge, particularly when you’re dealing with large budgets. Smaller teams can be a bit more agile, a bit more flexible. They can respond a bit more. But our problems are different. We have a big problem with discoverability. Without a big marketing budget, without an existing IP or a history as a game developer, getting anyone to pay attention to your game is a challenge.
That’s one thing, from the beginning–how do we create something that’s new and exciting and makes people pay attention? That’s one reason we wanted to make something like this. We’re fortunate to be in our position. We’re honored that people are turning around saying, “That looks interesting. I might give that a try.”
GamesBeat: How did the music come in, doing it as a musical?
Glendenning: The game is a musical, but it’s not a musical in the traditional sense. The characters aren’t constantly singing at you. I think of it as more like–each character has a musical theme. Originally it started off as just that, a musical theme that would play as you experienced their story. Sometimes they would talk over important scenes of drama with their music playing in the background. It evolved from there. We asked ourselves what would happen if they sang instead.
When we put that in, it just added an extra layer of surreal spookiness and strangeness. It made you feel a bit uncertain about what was real and what was imaginary. What’s part of the artistry and what’s really happening in the game world? That uncertainty matches the player character’s uncertainty. He’s in a strange country and everything seems a bit odd. We wanted players, even U.K. players, to feel like something was strange here. There’s nothing stranger than having someone sing a song at you six inches from your face.
GamesBeat: Do you have many more beats to reveal along the way?
Glendenning: We have a lot more secrets to reveal. We have more characters to show, more songs. There’s more information about the story and more activities you can do that we’ve not talked about. There are more places within the open world town that you can explore. People didn’t know that they could drive a moped around town, or drive a boat around the coastline and discover hidden caves. There’s a lot more to see. We have yet to announce the cast as well. There’s a lot more information we’ll be dropping out every month or so. The game is quite unusual and interesting and exciting, which means it’s interesting and exciting to hear about it.
GamesBeat: You’ve caught some virality, some attention.
Glendenning: It’s been drawing attention around the world since the Xbox showcase release. People are really connecting with the music. They’re connecting with some of the gameplay elements they’re familiar with, like the power washing. That helps create an entry point into it. The story certainly seems like it has some twists and turns that look exciting. Viewers even ask themselves, is the main character a good guy or a bad guy? That doesn’t seem clear. Is the cat a good guy? Is it a monster? Is it your dead father? All these questions came about just from the trailer. There are answers to all of these things, and we invite players to try the game on day one through Game Pass or pick it up on Steam and discover for themselves.