It's not often that I look at a videogame trailer and wonder whether I've hit my head or am halfway through a fever dream, but No Ghosts At The Grand at the Xbox Games Showcase 2025 ticked all of those boxes, with its talking cats, musical numbers, and evil spiders.
Similar to the mobile game Merge Mansion which is better known for all of the memes about the suspicious grandma than anything else, it looks like here you've inherited an old, rundown hotel, The Grand, after your father's death.
Turning up at the hotel for the first time you're greeted by a random woman with a cat and the caretaker, who she quickly lets you know is very "excentric". Well, I could've figured that out for myself because all but two seconds after meeting him he breaks out into song. To be fair it's catchy, so I'll give this one a .
We then get to see what it'll look like to renovate the hotel. Armed with the ultimate cleaning device you can pull the room apart so you can build it back up from scratch, spray paint walls with ready-to-go patterned wallpaper, and move furniture around at the click of a button. There'll also be puzzles for you to complete as you renovate.
You're not just confined to the hotel, you can also travel outside to the local village and help everyone with their chores. But beware, apparently this was exactly what your father was doing when he mysteriously disappeared. So my guess is that you'll be able to uncover the truth one cleaned patio at a time. "You’ll end up uncovering some surreal, supernatural secrets of the hotel’s past," according to the game's description.
From this point, the trailer takes a sharp turn from home renovation to a trippy detective thriller. The world seems to disintegrate at points shifting into a purple dreamscape, and apparently the only person you can trust throughout this ordeal is the cat, the talking cat.
At this point, I'd probably call it a day and leave The Grand Hotel to collect dust, but our protagonist is more dedicated than I would ever be, and it seems like nothing will phase him, not hordes of evil spiders, gloop monsters, or even the Kraken.
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