No Ghosts at the Grand Deep Dive | Official Xbox Podcast

SPEAKER 1: Games in this podcast range from E to M.

JOE SKREBELS: Hello, and welcome to the Official Xbox Podcast, the only podcast that comes from inside Xbox, but this time we are inside Xbox, inside Gamescom. We are at the Xbox booth at Gamescom. There are a lot of games to play, but one has really caught my eye. That is, There Are No Ghosts at the Grand, which you might remember being revealed at the Xbox Games Showcase in June, and I am pleased to report that it is playable here, and it is exactly as wild as it looked in that initial reveal. And I am joined by writer and game director Anil Glendinning.

ANIL GLENDINNING: Hi, Joe.

JOE SKREBELS: Hello, and lead gameplay developer Jack Conroy.

JACK CONROY: Hi there.

JOE SKREBELS: Hello, and we are going to talk through this really weird, exciting, strange, different game. I think a lot of people came out of that initial reveal and basically had a response of "What the hell is this?" So I'd love for you to talk me through exactly what you're making here and how it all fits together.

ANIL GLENDINNING: That's a great place to start. Yes, the trailer that we originally showed, showed a large cross-section of the game, but everything that we showed is all in the game and it's all in service of the story. In the game, you play as an ordinary American guy, a guy called Chris David, who inherits a dilapidated British seaside hotel, but not everything is as you would expect at the hotel. Now, we're not saying there are ghosts there, but there's definitely something lurking under the surface. So during the game, you will renovate, decorate, meet characters.

JACK CONROY: Well, yeah, I think we deliberately tried to make the trailer a bit confusing and try to throw people off, and that's why it starts with the decoration and then goes more and more into like the supernatural and the confusing. The demo reflects how much we have to show and have to offer, so it's not just the singing and the decorating. It's the moving around the town, meeting new people, finding new secrets, and like sort of messing around with the occult.

JOE SKREBELS: I think if someone has never heard of this game before, the fact that you just quietly breezed over singing might raise some eyebrows. We'll come back to that in a bit. But I think the thing that really sticks out is that decorating aspect that you were talking about, and when you get to this demo, you're introduced to power tools with a built-in Scottish AI. Would you say that's like the core of the game, the core of your interactions, using those tools to clean up and decorate your hotel?

ANIL GLENDINNING: So yes, in a manner of speaking. The tools that you have, which are inhabited by your AI DIY assistant, Robert C. MacBrushy, these tools are the main way in which you interact with the world, but you're not always decorating using them. Using these same tools, you can solve environmental puzzles within the game world. You can fend off the occasional spooky enemy that might make its appearance visible at nighttime. And there are other few surprise uses of these tools. So you're not always decorating, and as you proceed through the game, you'll discover how much depth and variety there is within them.

JOE SKREBELS: Can you talk us through what each of those tools do? Just in a mechanical sense, what are we using them for on a base level before we get to fighting off ghosts?

JACK CONROY: So you have a sandblaster, which you can use to break old furniture or take off old wallpaper off the walls, a power washer, which you use to wash off grime or paint new wallpaper on to the stuff that you've broken, the furniture tool, which I think is the most in-depth, probably the most fun, I think, to use, where you can create new furniture and really make the place your own, and then we have, what, the vacuum tool?

ANIL GLENDINNING: The vacuum tool can be used to suck up objects from the game world, and then also eject those objects back into the game world. You can use the sandblaster in a variety of unexpected ways. You can use the furniture tool to create bridges and open up new passageways through the world. And so there's always new and surprising ways in which you can use these.

JOE SKREBELS: Is there an element of player choice and player agency about what they're leaving behind as they play through this game and how they decorate around themselves?

JACK CONROY: So when you're playing for a mission for the first time, you will have set tasks that you need to do, so each room that you decorate, we will give you a few pointers and mostly just cleaning stuff up so that you have a nice blank canvas, and from there, you can do whatever you want. You can paint any color. You can paint any furniture. That remains and is persistent. So if there is a new mission in that room, it will look as silly or as ridiculous as you've made it or as nice as you made it. The decoration gives as much choice as you want, and we just work around that. In terms of the story, there's plenty of choice as well.

ANIL GLENDINNING: Yeah. So there are more rooms in the hotel than the story will actually take you through, so players will have a choice of which rooms they want to unlock, and each room will reveal more elements of the story. There's a minimum amount of decoration that players will need to do, but then after that, they're cut loose and they're then free to decorate it with the colors and the wallpaper and the furniture that they can find and be rewarded with through the story and through the gameplay.

JOE SKREBELS: Obviously, we're decorating this hotel, but the demo surprised me by, you know, I was decorating. I knew what I was doing. Then we get a phone call. There's a moped ride across the town. There's a boat repair section. There is a boat ride, and then we're on an island where there is more decoration and a whole explorable new space. So how are you managing to build a world around that hotel and how freely explorable is that by players?

ANIL GLENDINNING: So the game takes place in a fictional town of Kingswood-on-Sea, and it's a small open world that players can explore. It starts off with the hotel, and the hotel is a world upon itself, but outside of the hotel, you can explore this town, and more areas unlock and become available as you go through and you complete missions. Very often, new locations are introduced through missions that will take you away from the hotel to explore other parts of the town, but once you have completed the story elements there, you can then return back to that area, hidden coves, offshore islands, to pick up collectibles, complete mini-objectives and freely explore by yourself.

JOE SKREBELS: And let's return to the musical of it all, because on that boat ride that we're talking about, everyone starts singing, and even more surprisingly, I had dialogue choices where I could choose what my next lines in that song were going to be. So talk me through how, A, why this is a musical, and B, how you make this an interactive musical.

ANIL GLENDINNING: (laughs) Well, Joe, we didn't start off to make a musical. We started off to make a ghost story set in a spooky English town, but because of the setting, because of our inspiration, because of the environment, we had, you know, spooky ska, reggae, punk, sounds of The Clash, sounds of specials playing on loop as we were developing the game. And as we started writing dialogue for the characters, you know, the music started coming really naturally, and as soon as we started having the characters occasionally sing during some key sections, something about it just felt right and suited the surreal, unexpected nature of the world. So yes, you can sing back as well, but it's not wall-to-wall singing. It's much more like finding an old dusty record of cool songs that you haven't heard before which gets scattered throughout it. And so often, characters will sing to you while you are driving the boat or riding the moped or going about doing your decoration, and it just feels -- it feels like a natural fit within it, but like everything within the game, it's all in service of the storyline. And can you tell us a little bit about how we use a song in the boat ride?

JACK CONROY: So we use the songs to progress the story. They're not just sort of a background thing. You can sort of skip over them, but you will have certain sections where you'll regain control and you can choose a verse that will change the direction of maybe the story or maybe how a character feels about you. So I don't know if you noticed it. So depending on the verse you choose in the demo, one choice will have one of the characters, Maddie, gain affinity and like you more, and the other one leans more towards Colin, the caretaker. In making these choices throughout gameplay, as well as other things, increases a character's relationship with you and opens up more missions for you with them, so if you choose more Maddie-related options, you get more Maddie-related missions. So in the first run-through, you might not be able to do everything, depending on what you choose.

JOE SKREBELS: I see, and is that reflected to you as you're playing? Are you aware of that?

JACK CONROY: Yes.

JOE SKREBELS: Okay, nice. One thing I think there's an element of in the demo, but I think we see a little less compared to what we saw in the trailer, is that sort of there's a detective story almost behind this, or a supernatural sort of mystery story where Chris, the main character is, looking for supernatural secrets that he's not letting the town know. Can you tell us more about that element of the game and how that plays into the gameplay as well?

ANIL GLENDINNING: Yeah. So the character that you're playing, Chris, I suppose he can be described as a bit of an unreliable narrator.

JOE SKREBELS: Right.

ANIL GLENDINNING: You're playing him, but you don't know exactly who he is or what he's up to. He will often send you on missions to find things, and when you find them, he won't tell you what you found. He will speak to characters offline and won't let you know what's going on. So you as a player will start to figure out, is Chris a good guy? Is he a bad guy? What is it he's looking for? And so there's lots of different types of mysteries within the game, both who the main character is, and also, what all the other characters within the town want and what the underlying supernatural element of the game is.

JACK CONROY: Going back to the dialogue choices as well, sometimes you'll have a written text for something for Chris to say, and when you select it, he says something a little bit different.

JOE SKREBELS: Okay. I think in the trailer we saw him sort of tracing runes on a wall to open a secret door and things like that, so are these things we have to learn as a player to do, almost like abilities, or, you know, is there a gear-gating (phonetic) element to this, to some extent?

ANIL GLENDINNING: Yeah. So as you progress through the game, you'll find new ways to use your power tools in environments and in combinations that you didn't know about originally. Now, if you did know about them originally from the very beginning of the game, you could open these doors, you could access passages, so we're using a very knowledge-based system to allow you to progress through the game. And it will make you think and reexamine some of the areas you've already visited to think to yourself, how can I reutilize some of the new tools that I have to open up new passageways to discover new secrets for me? So we're embedding a lot of that into it, which is why it was important for us to have an open world within this game.

JOE SKREBELS: Yeah, so, I mean, at some point, are you aiming for There Are No Ghosts at the Grand speed-running community?

JACK CONROY: Very excited for that.

JOE SKREBELS: Just people brute-forcing their way through the early parts.

JACK CONROY: I think it's just how much freedom you give makes it very easy to speed-run, I think. I'm really interested in the creative ways people are going to get through the area. Even during the testing, the devs are like, "Oh, if I stack a crate on top of a box, on top of a bed, on top of a thing, I can get in here."

JOE SKREBELS: You mentioned it briefly there in terms of new uses for the tools, and there's a very notable one at the end of the demo, which is where it briefly becomes effectively a first-person shooter where you're firing furniture at ghostly chairs. I'd love you to talk me through that moment. Is that sort of like a set piece moment, or does that become more woven into the game after that point?

ANIL GLENDINNING: Yeah. Unfortunately, those become more woven into the game.

JOE SKREBELS: Okay (laughs).

ANIL GLENDINNING: There is definitely something alive inside the soft furnishings that you place within your environment. Players may find themselves setting up a beautiful, cozy room, only to turn their back on it to discover the furniture has rearranged itself. So there's certainly something lurking behind all the soft furnishings, coverings, and wallpaper within The Grand. As I said, players will discover new and exciting ways to use their tools, and some of those ways, you'll need to keep yourself alive during the nighttime if you're to survive during the day.

JOE SKREBELS: There's sort of a call-out of like a day/night cycle thing here. Can you talk us through how that works? Because we don't see that in the demo.

JACK CONROY: So in the demo, we have it done for you. So the specific missions, it will cut today or tonight, depending on what's happening, but you will have the choice to switch between them.

ANIL GLENDINNING: Yeah, there are specific activities you can do only during the day and specific activities that only happen at nighttime. The time of day doesn't travel while you're set within a time period, so players have that control. And so you can decorate to your heart's content during the daytime, but for some missions, you are going to have to move to the nighttime, and things tend to change around the town when the sun goes down.

JOE SKREBELS: Can your choices in decorating change how things work at nighttime? Like if we're talking about haunted chairs, are all my chairs going to come alive? If I place too many chairs, am I in trouble, essentially?

ANIL GLENDINNING: There are definitely rules and patterns that you will discover about the game world, and so things that you will do during the day will affect what happens at night time, and as you progress through the game, you'll begin to learn what these things are in order for you to keep your head above water, so to speak.

JOE SKREBELS: Other mechanics or game types that you haven't shown yet? But I think it's pretty clear that there are. Can you, like, tease towards any of those, or are you keeping them totally as surprises?

ANIL GLENDINNING: Well, we can tease a few. One of the ones you saw within the trailer was a character discovering a symbol and then painting that symbol on a wall, but that symbol can only be painted on certain walls in proximity of certain objects and certain shapes. Once you have learned this, you'll discover that these objects and shapes are all over the place. So what happens if you then take that tool, take that rune, and make that combination in different places at different times of day, maybe under a full moon? How does that affect the game world? There's more than one type of rune, and many of your tools have supernatural modes that can be discovered through that. So there are different elements of gameplay. There's also mini-games that you can discover throughout it as well, and again, all of this kind of feeds back in within the storyline. I mean, we have a crane on the boat, don't we?

JACK CONROY: Yes. I think a big thing we miss from the demo, purely for time, is all of the small things, so collectibles and exploration. So yeah, the crane on the boat, you can go out and you can dredge for treasure, and there you might pick up some interesting furniture. It might be nautical themed or it might be old and sunken in the depths, and from there, you can use the scanner tool, which we don't show, and that's sort of how we're doing our side quest progression, I suppose. So you can find new furniture, scan it in, and then you can use it decorating anywhere.

JOE SKREBELS: Nice.

JACK CONROY: So yeah. Because we're trying to keep everyone on track in the demo, we're missing out on more of the stuff I really enjoy, just going around finding small caches and secrets that you can scan and then use in your decoration.

JOE SKREBELS: You're a pretty small team. How is there this much stuff in this game (laughs)?

ANIL GLENDINNING: We're very lucky because Friday Sundae has access to Jack and many of our kind of very young but very talented and hard-working team, but we also have a vision about what it is that we want to do, and so we work very kind of collectively around what the developers can do, and some of them may come up and say, "I found this really clever idea that we can use a metal detector within the game. What do you think?" And then we insert that into the game, you know, and maybe the writers come up with a crazy idea and ask the artists, "Can we put this in?" And if we all come together and we all agree that it can be done, then we put it in. And so I think players are going to be quite surprised by some of the unexpected elements they find within the game. We want to keep people on their toes.

JACK CONROY: I think because we're quite a young team as well and we're benefiting from not knowing what we don't know, so there's plenty of things where it's like, yeah, I think we've done so much because you can throw out literally anything. We're like, yeah, we can probably do that, and there's no one telling you, "Oh, stop doing that," or we should go in this specific direction to fit like a market segment. It's literally just if you can think of it and it's fun, we will try our best to do it, and normally, we're pretty successful.

ANIL GLENDINNING: Yeah. Fun is the thing that's really been guiding us all the way through this process. You know, we try out ideas and we try and find the fun, and if it's fun and funny and the team love it, we keep it in and we make it work around the story.

JOE SKREBELS: So is it about building sort of the framework of the game and then being able to push new ideas on top of that and kind of let it accumulate in that way? You're not hamstrung by having to do one thing throughout the entire game.

ANIL GLENDINNING: Yeah. So the story and the gameplay that we come up with work hand in hand, and sometimes the story will be tweaked and changed a little bit because we've discovered a cool, fun mechanic that we really love doing, such as drive-by decoration when you're on your scooter. A lot of fun to do. And what happens if you build a mini-skate ramp using furniture and start driving around it on your scooter? If our team are spending a lot of time playing around with this, we must be doing something right. So we expand the story, we expand the missions to invite players to explore this themselves, and then we cut them loose to find their own fun within that mechanic.

JOE SKREBELS: That's amazing. So to that point, can you decorate anywhere, in that case? Because I was very much under the impression it's like you're in this space, you can only decorate here, but can you walk around the town just dropping things off?

JACK CONROY: So it tends to be we'll lock an area if we need it for a mission, but as I said before, once a mission's done, pretty much everywhere is free game.

JOE SKREBELS: Yeah, you're really opening yourself up to people trying to break things.

ANIL GLENDINNING: Yeah, we are playtesting it, and we invite people who like the look of it to come and play the demo and follow us on the socials and join our Discord and let us know what's working and what's not working. At the moment, you can pretty much do anything, and we think we might need to dial some of that back to stop people building towers of sofas that you can climb outside of the game world with.

JOE SKREBELS: Yeah, I was going to say, yeah (laughs).

ANIL GLENDINNING: But at the moment, yeah, you can pretty much decorate and paint anything within the town and within the hotel.

JOE SKREBELS: There's a lot more to it than I was expecting. So yeah, super exciting.

JACK CONROY: As we were testing, I'm writing stuff down, like, "Oh, I should probably put in a height limit. Oh, we should probably put in a lights limit." Just stuff like that.

JOE SKREBELS: You know, we've got The Grand, we've seen the docks, we've seen the island, but we do travel past a lot of other things. Are there, you know, shops to visit? Are there, you know, how is the rest of that town made up? And are there kind of unique areas that we'll need to interact with along the way?

ANIL GLENDINNING: Yes, absolutely. I mean, during the demo, you will take your boat and drive underneath the burned-down pier, which is an area that you can explore from land and at sea as well. There are boarded-up shops which you can renovate and bring back to life as well, and there's also other famous landmarks that you can visit, such as the lighthouse, old amusement arcades, a mini-golf course, and a bunch of other things that you may find in a dilapidated British seaside town that's off season in the pouring rain.

JOE SKREBELS: I'm kind of fascinated by this location. Like people may have noticed, we're all British, and it does feel like a love letter to a very specific type of seaside town that might not be as familiar to people unless they've watched things like Phantom Threat (laughs). It feels like there's a love for this kind of place coming from you guys.

ANIL GLENDINNING: Well, one of the first pieces of writing advice that anyone will ever give you is "write what you know," and so that's what we did. We wrote about the places that we visited as children that are in easy access for us so that we could create both a pastiche, but also a sense of place and a sense of location. We also wanted to give our character, who's an American, a real fish-out-of-water story, so it felt almost more alien to him than an actual alien planet that he might visit, you know. For the Americans and the non-Brits out there, England is kind of a strange place. It's a little weird, and we tried to put a little bit of that kind of British weird into the game.

JACK CONROY: Yeah, the only non-realistic thing is it's quite sunny all the time.

JOE SKREBELS: Yeah, that does stick out (laughs). So we're running out of time here. Is there any final thoughts, anything that we haven't covered? I mean, there's a lot to this game. I'm sure there's something I've missed along the way. Is there anything you want to tell people about your game that we haven't got to yet?

ANIL GLENDINNING: The best way to experience the game is to come down to Gamescom and try the demo for yourself. Follow us on Discord, take a look at our socials, and if you have thoughts, let us know about it. We're a small team and we respond to the community. We're really keen to hear what people think about it, what they like about it, and we can't wait to show the game to people and get their thoughts. So thank you.

JOE SKREBELS: Are you going to have the demo playable anywhere else after this? You know, if people can't make it to Gamescom, is there anywhere people can get hold of it?

ANIL GLENDINNING: We're certainly looking at those options right now, so we hope to bring some new and exciting news about that very soon.

JOE SKREBELS: Awesome. Well, that's all the time we have left for the Official Xbox Podcast. Thank you so much, Anil and Jack. There are No Ghosts at the Grand is coming out in 2026. I can't wait to find out more. I've just found out there's way more to this game than I thought there was going to be. I'm very excited for it. Thank you so much for joining us, and join us for the next one.