Friday Sundae wrote its haunted hotel game as a musical

The cat is sardonic, the power tools talk, and the hotel is lying to you. In There Are No Ghosts at the Grand, Chris David inherits a dilapidated English seaside hotel and gets 30 days and 30 nights to restore it: by day you drive a sandblaster, a paint sprayer and a furniture cannon through its faded rooms, and by night the same tools turn on the things moving under the wallpaper. The vacuum takes on vengeful spirits; the sprayer exposes invisible assailants. It arrives on Steam in December.

It wasn't quite my style, but playing the demo, it occured to me. This is a musical. Many games have music as texture, as background, as mechanic. But for a genre convention, singing characters are almost non-existent. Friday Sundae, the Bristol studio run by Rachel and Anil Glendinning, spent five years making children's games for the BBC and Cartoon Network before this debut, and somewhere in development their ghost story became a full musical: every character carries a theme song, and dialogue choices are made in song. "You can sing back in verse," Anil told an interview last year, with a score that leans on late-1980s reggae and punk. Bristol is Aardman's town, and it shows in the game's rubbery, talking-tool comedy.

Games have flirted with musical theater mostly through rhythm mechanics, which is singing as accuracy test. A book musical, where the number is the dialogue, is far rarer, and it is the same territory Killscreen visited when David Kanaga made an opera you play as a dog and when ONLY SLIME rebuilt their computer-game opera this summer. A renovation sim that argues with its ghosts in verse is a genre pileup nobody asked for, which is exactly the recommendation.