Lord of the Rings actor Billy Boyd sings as a power tool in There Are No Ghosts at the Grand

Most games about ghosts ask you to fear the house. There Are No Ghosts at the Grand asks you to fix it. Friday Sundae, a husband-and-wife studio from Bristol making its first game, has built its debut around an idea that sounds like a dare: a renovation game, a Lovecraftian mystery and a stage musical sharing a single first-person body. You inherit a crumbling English seaside hotel, scrub and rebuild it by day, hunt what lives in it by night, and the story pauses now and then so the cast can sing.

The new trailer, premiered at IGN Fan Fest, is narrated by two voices you would not expect in an indie renovation sim. Broadway star Alex Brightman, of Beetlejuice and Hazbin Hotel, plays Chris David, the heir to the Grand. Billy Boyd, Pippin in The Lord of the Rings, plays MacBrushy, a talking power tool. Brightman describes the game as carrying the energy of musical theatre into a first-person adventure, with players shaping how Chris answers the world through dialogue and through song.

First-person view holding an old photo and a power tool inside the dilapidated hotel lobby in There Are No Ghosts at the Grand — Image: Friday Sundae

That premise now has a bigger playable slice. Friday Sundae’s extended demo for Steam Next Fest offers three missions from Chapter 1, more than an hour of play: an autumn clean-up inside a retro seaside arcade, renovation and squabbling in the botanical gardens, and a Lovecraftian mystery buried in the underground bunker of a haunted island. Between the powerwashing and the puzzles, players meet the town’s eccentric residents and try out the ghost-hunting power tools.

“This demo is the clearest look yet at what Chapter 1 really is,” writer and creative director Anil Glendinning says in the announcement, pointing to the renovation, the ghost-hunting, the music, the village, “and the moment everything starts getting much stranger.” The structure is borrowed from television as much as from theatre. Chapter 1 runs across 15 episodic missions, each a story of its own inside a larger mystery and often ending on a cliffhanger, built to be played an episode at a time or binged.

Overgrown botanical gardens with glasshouses awaiting renovation in There Are No Ghosts at the Grand — Image: Friday Sundae

The rest of the cast leans just as musical: Marcia Richards and Josh Waters Rudge of The Skints, Ben Starr of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Elsie Lovelock of Iron Lung. The game was revealed at the Xbox Games Showcase 2025, appeared at Gamescom Opening Night Live this year, won the Tribeca Games Award and the music award at ChinaJoy, earned two gamescom award nominations and, by the studio’s count, has passed 185,000 Steam wishlists.

There Are No Ghosts at the Grand enters Early Access on PC via Steam and Xbox PC in December, with Chapter 1 holding 15 story missions and more than eight hours of play. Chapters 2 and 3 are planned for 2027. The free demo is available now on Steam for the duration of Next Fest.

For a studio this small, the wager is less about scale than about tone. Plenty of games have let players clean a haunted house. Very few have asked them to sing about it, and the demo is the first real chance to hear whether the two halves harmonise.

Tags: Steam Next Fest, game demos, Alex Brightman, Billy Boyd, Friday Sundae, musical games