Introduction

There Are No Ghosts at the Grand arrives like a creaky suitcase left in a forgotten hotel corridor: full of personality, slightly suspect, and very likely to sing at you. What Friday Sundae seems to be building is less a haunted-house shooter and more an emotional renovation sim that uses bedrooms, brooms and brass bands to tell a story. You inherit the dilapidated Grand from a missing father, take on the Sisyphean task of cleaning and restoring it across a 30-day time limit, and slowly learn that the building - and everyone in it - carries more voice than dust. On Xbox Series X/S this Unity-made first-person game promises cozy simulation by daylight and ghost-bashing by night, but the real headline is how the characters are written into the mechanics: songs, duets and a Scottish paintbrush called Robert C MacBrushy all conspire to make character arcs feel like playable music boxes.

Gameplay

Gameplay is double-faced in the most literal sense: soap-and-mop during sunlight, and broomstick-versus-phantasm in the dark. The design is deceptively simple on paper. You clean rooms, repair fixtures, solve puzzles and explore a small open world. The twist is in how each activity maps onto character discovery. Cleaning a room is rarely just about sanitary pride; it is an act of excavation. Dust lifts and reveals notes, song verses, and memories tied to the Grand92s inhabitants - real or spectral. These revealed artifacts push the story forward, allowing Chris David, the protagonist, to piece together both his missing father92s story and the hotel92s slow slide toward becoming an actual personality with a taste for wartime jazz and ska. Chris92s arc is anchored to the ticking clock of thirty nights. That deadline is not a mere difficulty slider; it92s a narrative metronome. Each day is a ledger: renovate this, repair that, or chase a rumor in town. Every night, the stakes tighten: ghosts swarm and your cleaning implements moonlight as blunt instruments of spectral evicting. The composition of what you choose to prioritize - a rickety ballroom93s restoration or a whispering guestroom93s secrets - directly sculpts how Chris grows. If you chase all the structural fixes first, Chris becomes the pragmatic heir, focused on legacy and practical survival. If you spend time coaxing songs from the hotel and duetting with characters, you funnel Chris toward curiosity and empathy. The player chooses the version of Chris by choosing which strands of the Grand to rescue. Robert C MacBrushy is a delightfully absurd AI DIY assistant: a Scottish paintbrush that talks to you and provides practical guidance. He92s designed to be a mechanical mentor, but the writing gives him the potential for a small arc of his own. At first MacBrushy is a tidy voice of instruction, pragmatic and occasionally snippy. As you engage in more musical duels and emotional discoveries, his commentary can shift from purely helpful to almost conspiratorial - a brush that begins to wonder whether the grime it cleans away is better left as memory. The game leaves room for this shift by embedding personality into routine prompts: the tone of a tooltip subtly changing over days is a surprisingly effective way to show growth without cutscenes. Mr. Bones the Bastard, the hotel cat, functions as both comic relief and existential guide. Speaking with the cat is a nocturnal ritual; it offers cryptic counsel about how to save yourself from the Grand92s curse. This sets up a classic trickster arc: the animal who knows the building better than the human protagonist and who tests Chris92s motives. If you treat Mr. Bones as a companion rather than a mere quest-giver, his quips and nudges gradually reshape Chris92s goals from restoration for profit to restoration for understanding. The cat92s arc is less about change and more about revealing: it is the constant that helps other characters' secrets surface. Music is an actual mechanic and a narrative engine. Each character has a distinct song rooted in British Ska, Punk and Wartime Jazz, and the soundtrack is not wallpaper94it92s a storytelling tool. Characters sing about their pasts, their regrets, and their small joys, and the player can duet and even alter verses with original lyrics. This mechanic converts emotional labor into gameplay resources. Altering a verse might unlock a memory, soothe an apparition, or change a ghost92s behavior. The audacity of letting players write lyrics in a duet is the game's smartest gamble: it forces you to inhabit the voice of the Grand92s cast, to make choices that are both performative and sincere, and to accept that your version of Chris is partly defined by the songs you sing with the building92s inhabitants. Structurally, the small open world allows free exploration but asks you to be a ruthless time manager. Choices carry weight: spend an afternoon restoring the lobby's chandeliers and you might miss a midnight duet that reveals a crucial memory about Chris92s father. The life-or-death metaphor of restoration is literalized by the 30-day limit; if you fail to complete the hotel, Chris's soul is at risk. This makes every character interaction, every song, every scrap of narrative evidence meaningful, which is a rare kind of design that treats story fragments as currency. The result is a game that rewards curiosity. You can treat the Grand like a checklist and still finish the main loop, but the emotional payoffs arrive only if you follow the smaller threads: duets, cat conversations, and the sneaky snark of a paintbrush.

Graphics

On Xbox Series X/S the Unity engine is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the aesthetic department. Friday Sundae seems to be leaning into a cozy, lived-in palette rather than photoreal polish. That choice suits the character-focused design: textures of peeling wallpaper, soot-stained teacups, and threadbare carpeting carry narrative weight the moment you examine them. Lighting is particularly telling in this game94daylight washes make every repaired surface feel like a small triumph, while night lighting turns corners into cinematic stages for duets and hauntings. Ghosts are less about jump-scares and more about stylish silhouettes and musical punctuation. The Grand itself looks like a character: its architecture, era-mismatched decor and war-time flourishes visually narrate a history that you are peeling back. Performance considerations on Series X/S should be comfortable; Unity92s modern toolset allows for crisp shadows and expressive facial idiosyncrasies during duets without demanding triple-A GPU tantrums. The small open world feels dense rather than empty, which helps maintain a consistent frame-rate and prevents the uncanny valley of half-populated towns. Artistic direction trumps hyperrealism here, and that92s a good thing94the visuals always serve the characters and the songs they sing rather than showboating tech specs.

Conclusion

There Are No Ghosts at the Grand is a charming, slightly madcap promise: a cozy sims-adventure that wants to be a musical, a mystery and a morality play about inheritance and memory all at once. Its strongest trick is how it ties character arcs to player action. Chris David92s transformation from thorny heir to empathetic restorer is not just told to you; it is performed by you in duets, in the order you choose to restore rooms, and in the way you treat a talking paintbrush and a shadier-than-he-looks cat. The 30-day limit gives urgency without making the narrative feel like a sprint, and the music system94complete with lyric-altering duets94is a bold, game-changing flourish. There are risks: the very mechanics that make characters matter could feel fiddly if the writing or UI stumbles, and players who want clear-cut plot beats might be frustrated by a story that asks them to assemble meaning from small fragments. But for anyone intrigued by character-driven games that let you sing your way through emotional labor, this is a rare bird. Friday Sundae92s Brighton-born charm shows through every scuffed tile and scratchy brass horn. If you like your horror with a side of ska and your inheritance wrapped in wartime jazz, pencil in 2026 for a visit to the Grand. Bring a mop, a notepad for lyrics, and a healthy skepticism about animated paintbrushes. You might come for the ghosts; you92ll stay for the characters.