There Are No Ghosts At The Grand Is Utterly Weird, And That’s What Makes It Great

After my hands-off time with There Are No Ghosts at the Grand, one thing is immediately clear: this game lives on weirdness. It’s equal parts cozy restoration sim, supernatural horror, and off-kilter British seaside silliness, all stitched together with a gleeful disregard for normalcy.

You play as Chris David, who inherits a dilapidated seaside hotel and has 30 days to restore it, armed with friendly talking power tools that feel like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon. A sandblaster, a paint sprayer, and even a ‘furniture cannon’. It’s as playful as it sounds. The mechanics immediately reminded me of the serotonin supply of PowerWash Simulator, with every wall you paint and lamp you place ticking up a completion percentage until the the Grand is remade in your own vision of restored grandeur.

Paint By Day, Panic By Night

The oddball tools aren’t just gimmicks, what stands out most is how good it feels to use them. Spraying paint across bare walls has that instant-hit satisfaction. You watch dull plaster bloom into color.

Furniture doesn’t just plop into place; it floats, tilts, and settles in a way that makes arranging rooms feel playful rather than fussy. There are requirements to meet if you want to progress, but they never feel like they box you in. Instead, the game encourages creativity, letting you decide whether that lamp belongs squarely by the bed or in some eccentric corner. Each restoration becomes its own little canvas, one you shape with just enough freedom to make it feel uniquely yours.

Adding to the depth of these renovations is how Chris can experience memories of the spaces he’s renovating. Ghostly figures appear to reenact fragments of the past, often triggered by simple objectives, like placing a chair in its original spot. These moments act as the connective tissue between the restoration work and what surfaces at night, grounding the game’s weirdness with surprising emotional depth.

At night, the exact same tools you’ve been using to plaster wallpaper or fire ottomans into place take on a more combative role. In one sequence, blocky chair-spiders skittered out of the dark and had to be blasted apart with redecorating guns. The tools become your ghost-busting best friends.

The Musical Interludes Are As Weird As You Expect

What I wasn’t expecting to love as much as I did was the musical angle. Every so often, a character will break into song, and not in a full-blown-Broadway-number kind of way, more like a little musical hiccup that fits perfectly into the offbeat setting.

It feels a little weird, yes, even unsettling as darkness gathers at night. But there’s a breezy charm to it all, like walking into a shop for a loaf of bread and discovering the cashier raps about the ghost in aisle three.

Dreary, Yet Charming

The seaside setting is what ties it all together. When I asked why they chose a British coast, the developer said the team spent summers visiting similar coastal towns growing up, and it shows in the details. The setting is gorgeous, feeling both cartoony and dreary, like a postcard left out in the rain. It’s a place that feels worn down by decades of salt air. The art direction leans whimsical, almost exaggerated at times, but it never loses that undercurrent of melancholy.

There Are No Ghosts at the Grand is half whimsical renovation sim, half creeping horror. It’s cozy until it isn’t, silly until it gets serious, and I’m fascinated by how effortlessly it walks that line.

There Are No Ghosts at the Grand

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