Friday Sundae today debuted a new music video for There Are No Ghosts at the Grand during the Future Games Show Spring Showcase, alongside the announcement that Marcia Richards has joined the cast. The supernatural mystery game, which blends renovation, combat, and full musical numbers into a single package, has a playable demo available now on Steam.
The setup splits cleanly down the middle. During the day, Chris David wields a set of friendly, talking power tools to restore the Grand Hotel's faded grandeur, spraying paint, blasting sand, and launching furniture into place. When night falls, those same tools transform into weapons against the supernatural. The vacuum takes on vengeful spirits. The paint sprayer exposes invisible assailants. The furniture cannon subdues slithering spooks with a well-aimed bookcase to the face. Chris has exactly 30 days and 30 nights to restore the crumbling building before it, or something else, claims him. That dual identity runs through every system, the same instruments of creation becoming instruments of survival once the sun drops, and the game leans into the tonal whiplash between cheerful DIY and genuine menace.
Friday Sundae is an independent studio based in the South West of England, led by husband-and-wife team Rachel and Anil Glendinning. The team combines AAA industry veterans with newer talent, and There Are No Ghosts at the Grand is their debut title. The musical ambition alone signals a studio swinging for something unusual. Each character Chris meets has their own story and their own song, spanning spooky ska to wartime jazz to skater punk. Players duet with characters to reveal deeper truths about them, turning musical performance into a narrative mechanic rather than a cutscene.
Chris David unexpectedly inherits a dilapidated hotel on the English coast and arrives to find a building hiding something far stranger than damp walls and dodgy electrics. A lovecraftian mystery winds through the Grand Hotel's history, its former owners, and Chris's own buried past. The surrounding village holds secrets too, with every townsfolk guarding something. Lily, now voiced by Richards, is one of eight central characters in the game's supernatural ensemble. Richards describes her as funny, feisty, and optimistic but also vulnerable and uncertain, trying to hold the not-haunted hotel together when Chris suddenly appears. Richards is best known as the London vocalist, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist from The Skints, her musical background shaped by reggae, ska, dub, and punk, a voice that fits the game's genre-hopping soundtrack.
Renovation work extends beyond the hotel itself. The surrounding village is full of buildings in need of attention: players shoot paint and paper onto the walls of the old fish and chip shop, blow out broken windows at the florist, and smash old furniture in the bookshop. Between jobs there are light environmental puzzles that use the hotel's dark past to unravel cryptic clues, and quieter activities scattered across the faded seaside setting, from mini-golf and metal detecting on the beach to taking a fishing boat out to hidden coves. The game asks players to slow down and explore, then yanks the mood sideways when nightfall arrives.
The newly released music video, "Skeletons in the Closet," captures the tone Friday Sundae is building: off-kilter humour threaded through lovecraftian dread, with full-blown musical performance holding it all together. Richards' casting is the first of several announcements the studio plans to reveal in the coming weeks. For a debut title from a small team, the ambition is striking: a game where you can paper a wall, fight a ghost with a vacuum, and break into a ska duet with a character whose secrets you're still unravelling.