When a game is set in a haunted house, you would probably expect it to stay in that location, and it's also a good excuse to not have to show any of its spectres. But There Are No Ghosts At The Grand is game that's out to subvert expectations, and it's not one that's easy to sum up in a short sentence.
Studio co-founder and creative director Anil Glendinning describes it as "a spooky cosy renovation musical investigation game" where your American protagonist has inherited the titular and dilapidated Grand Hotel in an Engish seaside town.
As a British studio based in Bristol, Friday Sundae is in a good position to capture authentic Britishness in its fictional open world of Kingswood-on-Sea.
"We take a lot of inspiration from our own city and surrounding areas, like the Grand Pier at Weston-super-Mare and Tyntesfield [in North Somerset]," lead artist Dillon Waugh tells me. "We've taken trips to these locations to see what makes them so special and then think how we replicate that inside the game."
Given all the attention to detail in its realistic environments, down to the cobblestone streets and brick work, it's interesting to learn that There Are No Ghosts At The Grand is being developed in Unity rather than Unreal. The former is already popular for indie devs making stylised games, but Glendinning highlights its High Definition Rendering Pipeline (HDRP) as being pivotal in building Kingswood-on-Sea.
"Things like volumetric fog, full PBR [Physically Based Rendering] lighting materials, and Shader Graph have been super useful as well," Waugh adds. "There's just a lot of features that allows us to sort of bridge that gap, where people will think we are using Unreal when we're actually using Unity."
In contrast to a decade ago when indie game Everybody's Gone To The Rapture created a realistic English countryside village but without any of the villagers, There Are No Ghosts At The Grand's Kingswood-on-Sea isn't a ghost town; it's populated with distinct hand-sculpted characters, from the vicar to the local bobby.
This has been possible because, although the town's environments are quite realistic, its inhabitants are a little more stylised, owing to the fact that the game is also a musical where characters will occasionally burst into song.
"As soon as we knew that we wanted to do that, that started to dictate how these characters should operate," Glendinning explains. "If they are doing a lot of facial emoting, you want to exaggerate their facial features so you can see that expression clearly. We also wanted to really express their physical motion, so their hands are slightly oversized, their heads are slightly bigger than real life."
"The game is also at its heart a mystery, and so we knew that it's very important that the player can tell if a character is lying to them, if they're a little bit shifty and looking around," he continues, conjuring the vibes of LA Noire's interrogation mode.
"We wanted to get that captured in the performance because we want players to play a little bit of a detective and try and figure out what is the truth at the heart of the story."
The team has put a lot of care into designing a multi-purpose DIY gun (above), which includes an AI assistant named Robert C. McBrushy, personified by a mascot reminiscent of 1920s rubber hose animations.
Every single mode of interaction with the gun is clearly colour-coded, such as the red sand-blaster, the yellow furniture cannon or the blue power sprayer. So if you use the scanner, it will highlight objects and environments in the corresponding colour that you can interact with, while mission objectives are also matching those colours.
"We assigned the colours in that way so it's all super readable, really easy to see what you're supposed to do, we wanted that ability where you don't have to read too much, you can just see your objectives, and that makes playing the game super easy to do, and super enjoyable," Waugh explains, giving the example of an English-only demo at Gamescom where there were visitors from around the world who were able to pick up and play without having to read anything.
However, it's also different from the yellow paint design that's been plaguing games in recent years because Glendinning says it's also fine to play the game without using the scanner at all.
"We designed everything to make it look sensible and believable, so if walls looked like they needed painting, it's because it has paint peeling off it, or it looks old in comparison to other walls that weren't designed to be interacted with," he concludes. "We want people to use their common sense when they explore this strange town."
There Are No Ghosts At The Grand is coming soon to PC, Xbox Series X/S and Xbox Game Pass. A free demo will be available on Steam this Halloween.
For more unique games for inspiration, see our other features on indie game devs.
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