There Are No Ghosts at the Grand Preview - Fixer Upper

There Are No Ghosts at the Grand was revealed during this year's Xbox summer showcase, and it was an instant highlight of the show for me. It's a mixture of reggae musical, renovation sim, and spooky mystery adventure game, and what's more, it's tiny UK studio Friday Sundae's first title.

I got a chance to sit down with a demo of the game, which showcases a slice of gameplay during which I (partially) renovated a hotel, sojourned down to a creepy abandoned island, and fought off monstrous chair-spider ghosts.

All of that might sound like tremendous fun, and I have faith that with a little extra time, it could be. Unfortunately, the demo I played is in serious need of some extra work before it's ready to open its doors to the public.

There Are No Ghosts at the Grand Is Ambitious as Heck

During my time with There Are No Ghosts at the Grand's demo, which lasts around 30 minutes, I got to experience a tasting platter showing off all three of its core pillars. It's a pretty brief demo, and I don't think it necessarily does the full scope of No Ghosts justice.

The renovation mechanics on offer here are...fine. If you're expecting the depth of something like House Flipper or PowerWash Simulator, you're likely going to be disappointed; the systems are fairly surface-level, and they don't amount to much more than "point the right gun at the thing".

Still, the feelings of hoovering up loose debris or popping broken pieces of a boat back onto its hull are satisfying, and I can imagine that the areas you'll be expected to renovate will increase in complexity as you progress through the full game.

There's a fun little twist on the renovation mechanics whereby you need to use your house-flippin' tools to right the scenes of memories so they can progress, but again, they're not too much more than just following on-screen instructions.

During this demo, I didn't get much of a chance to explore No Ghosts' gorgeous English seaside setting, but I'm hoping that the full game will offer more incentive to wander the environs of the Grand and uncover hidden secrets. It's hard to say how well exploration and narrative will stack up since the demo is so short.

It's impressive that Friday Sundae is attempting to cram a reggae musical into There Are No Ghosts at the Grand as well, but I have to say I'm a little worried about how that element is going to pan out.

This demo offers one brief musical sequence, which admittedly isn't anywhere near enough to express a full opinion, but the character animation feels a little too stilted for singers to express the full range of the songs' emotions.

It remains to be seen whether Friday Sundae's game can capitalize fully on the immense potential of incorporating musical sequences into its exploration-renovation loop, but on the strength of the song snippet presented during this demo, I'm skeptical.

There Are No Ghosts at the Grand, but There Are Bugs

Let's get one thing out of the way first: this is a demo, and it's an early one at that. There Are No Ghosts at the Grand is not due to launch until 2026, so Friday Sundae has plenty of time to rid itself of some of the more bothersome bedbugs in its hotel's rooms.

That's a good thing, too, because I encountered no shortage of bugs during my time with this demo. I had to restart chapters multiple times due to game-breaking (demo-breaking?) progress bugs, and the starting position for one chapter restart in particular is halfway through the floor.

Performance-wise, my rig struggled with No Ghosts as well. This is perhaps an even more subjective criticism than any other I've offered so far, but I'm running an RX 9070 XT and a Ryzen 7 9700X (plus 64GB of RAM), which is way above the game's minimum specs.

Despite that, performance was iffy, with lots of slowdown and chugging in scenes that weren't even particularly busy. Not only that, but some sections stuttered and froze up for several seconds, and while they always righted themselves in the end, I constantly worried each hitch would be the point at which the demo crashed.

I couldn't find a way to change the graphical options beyond resolution upscaling, and changing those options didn't seem to alter performance for me at all. Again, though, I should stress that there's every chance you won't experience these issues. We all know how mercurial PC gaming can be.

At the end of the demo, Friday Sundae sets up an exciting escape sequence, and my support character yelled at me that there was no way I could take all of the things chasing me, so I should just "leg it", in his words (a colloquialism I appreciated seeing as a Brit).

However, when I then dispatched every enemy chasing me with relative ease, There Are No Ghosts at the Grand didn't seem to know what to do, so it just kind of didn't do anything for a while before a title drop anticlimactically brought the demo to a close.

It was a funny moment, sure, but it also made me worried about No Ghosts' future. Yes, there's still lots of time for Friday Sundae to fix it, but I'm not sure this demo was ready for release, at least not in my eyes. This one's going to need a lot more time in the oven.

There Are No Ghosts at the Grand Preview | Final Thoughts

I'm really rooting for Friday Sundae and There Are No Ghosts at the Grand. The genre mixture on offer here is so unique and so mad that I want nothing more than for this game to launch and blow me away.

Sadly, on the strength of this demo, I think it's got a very long way to go before it can achieve that. It's messy, janky, and glitchy, so it's safe to say that a lot of renovation is needed before this hotel is ready to admit guests, even for the demo itself.

There Are No Ghosts at the Grand was previewed on a PC using a demo build provided by the developers. All screenshots were taken during the preview process.