No Ghosts at the Grand, described on its own card as “a musical, Lovecraftian renovator” and on stage by host Geoff Keighley as a musical horror renovation game, was announced at Gamescom Opening Night Live 2026 by Friday Sundae, a studio from Bristol, England. It is coming to Steam, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, and Xbox Cloud, with Xbox Play Anywhere and Game Pass badges on the card. No date was given.
It stars Billy Boyd, Pippin from The Lord of the Rings, as a character named Robert C. MacBrushy, with Alex Brightman and Elsie Lovelock also credited. The card carries a Tribeca Festival 2026 Games award and London Games Festival laurels.
The setting is a faded British seaside town in autumn: a boarded-up bandstand under falling leaves, a derelict pier with its ironwork rusting into the sea, a crumbling grand hotel. The pitch is “decorator by day, ghost hunter by night”. By day you restore the town in first person with a paint gun that has a cheerful cartoon mascot on the side, spraying colour back onto peeling walls and refitting a bandstand until it hosts a grand piano and bunting. By night you “investigate hidden ghost stories”, following glowing figures through the streets and pinning clues to a corkboard of hidden monsters, arcane symbols, a family curse, possessed music, secret doors, and “something in the hotel?”, before the trailer erupts into a red Lovecraftian nightmare of tentacles, a giant green-eyed cat, and shadow figures.
The song over it all sets the tone: “don’t mind the faded decor, just ignore the peeling paint, this place was full of glamour but it’s faded away”, answered by a darker voice “whispering poison truth”, and the refrain that gives the game its name.