Editor’s note: Our Tribeca 2026 coverage continues with Jesse Rylander’s conversation with Anil Glendinning, co-founder and creative director of Friday Sundae, the studio behind There Are No Ghosts at the Grand. Jesse met Glendinning at Tribeca Games in June and played the game on the gallery floor at Pier 57. What follows is his account.
There Are No Ghosts at the Grand, inside the greenhouse. Courtesy of Friday Sundae.
Some games tell you their genre in a word. There Are No Ghosts at the Grand needs a whole breath. When I sat down with Anil Glendinning at Tribeca Games, he described it, without blinking, as “a musical, narrative, renovation, horror, comedy, story game.” After spending time with it on the gallery floor at Pier 57, I understood why he didn’t bother trimming the list. Every one of those words is doing work.
The setup is simple enough. You play Chris David, an American who inherits a crumbling seaside hotel in England from the British side of a family he has never met. By day, you restore the Grand and the sleepy village around it with a toolkit of increasingly bizarre power tools, some of which talk back. By night, those same tools turn into ghost-hunting gear. There is also a sardonic cat. And, at unpredictable moments, the people of the town break into song.
Glendinning is co-founder and creative director of Friday Sundae, a UK studio of just ten people, and he co-directs the game with producer Rachel Glendinning. The game had its world premiere at Tribeca in June 2026 and won the Tribeca Games Award, the festival’s prize for excellence in artistic storytelling, chosen from 12 official selections.
Our conversation made it clear that nearly every choice in it, from the textures to the soundtrack, traces back to one idea: a ghost story should feel like a memory.
Players at the Tribeca Games gallery, Pier 57, New York. Photo: Jesse Rylander.
A ghost story built from a childhood
When the team began writing, Glendinning said, they went back to the places that had frightened them as kids. Not haunted mansions, but something more specific and more British. “We thought of rainy seaside towns in the UK that are out of season,” he told me. “These weird liminal spaces that are empty of people. Places that are designed for fun but which look frightening at nighttime and in the rain, like fairground rides and deserted amusement arcades.”
If you have ever walked a boardwalk in February, you know exactly the feeling. Kingswood-on-Sea, the fictional town around the Grand, is built out of that mood.
The music came from the same place. Growing up, the team was listening to reggae, ska, and punk from the late 70s and 80s: The Clash, Madness, The Specials, The Selecter. At first, those references were meant only to shape the score. Then something happened that Glendinning describes as almost accidental.
“Almost naturally, almost organically, characters started to sing these words,” he said. “And we found that it felt like a perfect match for this surreal, slightly unsettling environment that we wanted to create.”
The musical numbers are not a break from the horror; they feed it. “There is something a little bit surreal and unsettling about someone singing to you,” Glendinning explained, “and you as a character being aware that they’re singing, but they being completely unaware of it.” That mismatch, he hinted, is part of the mystery itself. There is a reason this town sings, and a reason the cat and the power tools talk.
Painting a half-remembered place
The Grand’s visual world follows the same logic. Friday Sundae chose painted textures over photorealism, giving the hotel and its surroundings the quality of a half-remembered place.
“It naturally came from the idea of trying to capture a memory,” Glendinning said. Something closer to a half-forgotten photograph, or a roughly sketched image you carry around in your head. “The story that we want to tell didn’t match photorealistic graphics. We wanted it to feel ethereal. We wanted it to feel surreal. We wanted it to feel dreamlike.”
To get there, the studio’s artists hand-paint every texture in the game. The characters and environments sit slightly off true, just uncanny enough to keep you uneasy without tipping into caricature. It is a reminder that in game art, as in animation, style is a storytelling decision before it is an aesthetic one. Here the brushwork is the haunting.
There Are No Ghosts at the Grand, the garden and glasshouses. Courtesy of Friday Sundae.
Lyrics that start as poetry
Each character in the Grand sings in their own genre. The town’s young police officer leans into fast-talking reggae, a direct nod to The Clash. Others have their own sounds, matched to who they are.
Glendinning writes the lyrics himself, as part of each character’s story. “For me, it started off very much as poetry,” he said. Those pieces then go to Luke, the game’s musical director, who shapes them into songs and builds the music around their intention. The process, in his words, was organic and collaborative, and frequently ended up somewhere neither of them expected.
His rule for navigating that: “Follow the story, follow the characters, and follow the music, and see what comes out of it. And then trust gamers to really get what it is that we’re trying to do.”
Casting the ghost with the most
Of course, a musical needs voices. For Chris David, the team wanted an actor who could move from sinister and spooky to funny, mysterious, and completely out of control, sometimes within a single scene. They found that range in Alex Brightman, who spent years playing the title role in Beetlejuice on Broadway.
“We reached out to him just on the off chance,” Glendinning said, “and the stars aligned.” Brightman was interested in what the studio was building, and they have been working together ever since. His deep roots in New York theater made a premiere at Tribeca feel like a happy coincidence.
Friday Sundae has also added another familiar voice to the cast: Billy Boyd, best known as Pippin in The Lord of the Rings, plays MacBrushy, a Scottish power tool who talks and, naturally, sings.
There Are No Ghosts at the Grand, a cat and a glowing doorway. Courtesy of Friday Sundae.
A small team, room for surprises
The thread that ties all of this together is ambition at an unusually human scale. Glendinning described Friday Sundae as fully self-funded and self-publishing, with a team of ten. The priority, he said, was to deliver well on a small number of platforms rather than spread thin.
That smallness is also the point creatively. Glendinning looks back fondly at the original Xbox and PS2 era, when 3D genres were still taking shape, and smaller, more agile teams could try strange mechanics just to see if they were fun. He name-checked Viva Piñata, the Clock Tower games, and the early Silent Hill titles as games that genuinely surprised him.
“Today, you buy a game, it’s in the genre, you kind of know what to expect from that,” he said. “So we wanted to create something that was unexpected.” Mechanics and story turns are designed to arrive from angles you won’t anticipate. “If you like surprises,” he told me, “if you like unpredictability, There Are No Ghosts at the Grand is for you.”
The Tribeca Games gallery, Pier 57, New York. Photo: Jesse Rylander.
After my conversation with Glendinning, I keep coming back to that image of an empty arcade in the rain. Plenty of games try to scare you with what is hiding in the dark. This one seems more interested in the strange feeling of a place that was built for joy and then left alone too long. And then, of course, someone starts to sing.
There Are No Ghosts at the Grand is planned to enter Early Access on PC in December 2026. A demo is available now on Steam.
Interview, words and photography: Jesse Rylander
Interview location: Tribeca Games 2026, Pier 57, New York
Game images: Courtesy of Friday Sundae
Selected game credits
Developer and publisher: Friday Sundae
Creative director and writer: Anil Glendinning
Production director: Rachel Glendinning
Principal animator: Chi Chii Huang
Motion capture: CAMERA, University of Bath
Game and demo: There Are No Ghosts at the Grand on Steam