Endings - Silent Hill 2 Remake Guide - IGN (2025)

This Silent Hill 2 Remake Endings Guide contains discussion of what factors in your game determine the ending you receive, and how to manipulate them to get the ending you want.

Silent Hill 2 Endings Guide

The first time you clear SH2R, you'll receive one of 3 endings, but you might not understand exactly why you got what you did. Naturally, this involves venturing into spoiler territory. It's a good idea to avoid reading this section until after you've cleared the game on your own, as the events that influence your ending play out across the entirety of SH2R.

For returning players, these are revised and extended versions of the same 3 endings as were found in the original 2001 version of Silent Hill 2. You know what's going to happen, and probably get why, but you haven't seen them like this before.

Who You Are In the Dark

The ending you receive is determined by a series of decisions that you've made throughout the game, few of which were obvious at the time. None of them seem to have anything to do with most of the stats that are tracked in your final results screen, such as the number of enemies you've killed, your favorite weapon, or your difficulty settings.

Instead, the criteria that influence your ending are relatively subtle and often invisible to you. Your ending is broadly determined by how you've chosen to play James during his run through Silent Hill, which indicates what kind of person he actually turned out to be.

If you got "Leave," you've been acting as if the one thing on James' mind was to have that last conversation with Mary. If he got distracted, it wasn't for long. James was here to be forgiven, even if he didn't know that at first. This is generally perceived as SH2's "good" ending.

Conversely, if you got "Maria," James has decided he's more interested in pursuing Maria than in anything else he could've found in Silent Hill. In the final analysis, James is utterly selfish.

Finally, if you got "In Water," your version of James had a death wish. His time in Silent Hill was driven by guilt and sorrow, and at the end, he can't imagine any way to go on.

The Specifics

From our experiments, the various factors that determine your ending seem to be very similar if not identical to those from the original version of SH2, with a couple of new options courtesy of Bloober Team.

This section is under construction. Don't take it as gospel; these are effectively hypotheses as of now.

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If you want to get "Leave":

• Inspect Mary's Letter and the Photo of Mary in your inventory at least twice over the course of the game. Do not leave them behind when you take the Employee Elevator in the hotel.

• Do not inspect Angela's Knife in your inventory.

• Stay at or near full health at all times. Keep James in good shape, like he cares what happens to him.

• Minimize the amount of time you spend with Maria. Do not double-check on her in the Hospital or Labyrinth. Don't worry about protecting her when she's in danger.

• In the long hallway after your fight with the dual Pyramid Heads, listen to the entire conversation before leaving.

"Leave" is by far the easiest ending to get, as it basically requires you to play the game like you normally might: stay healthy, explore everywhere at all opportunities, be rightly suspicious of Maria.

Clearing SH2R with "Leave" unlocks the trophy/achievement Making Peace.

If you want to get "Maria":

• Do not inspect Mary's Letter, the Photo of Mary, or Angela's Knife.

• Spend at least 10 minutes near Maria while she's with you. Don't get too far away if you have a choice in the matter.

• Do not allow Maria to take any damage from monsters in the Western South Vale chase sequence or the hospital basement. Save her from the Mannequin ambush at Jacks Inn, and just to be safe, don't take her with you to explore down Nathan Avenue.

• Do not bump into or hit Maria yourself.

• Visit Maria while she's resting in the Hospital. Be sure to return to Room C5 once you have the first patient's bracelet to trigger an optional conversation.

• Visit Maria in her cell in the Labyrinth at least twice.

• After you clear the Labyrinth, revisit Maria in the prison cell before you leave.

• After the fight with the dual Pyramid Heads in the finale, run down the long hallway as quickly as possible and leave before Mary finishes speaking.

"Maria" can be difficult to get unless you're trying to do so deliberately. The easiest way to put it permanently out of reach is to get her hurt by monsters during your run through Western South Vale. If you're able to get this ending, you'll unlock the trophy/achievement Vicious Circle.

If you want to get "In Water":

• Inspect Angela's Knife in your inventory at least once. This appears to be a mandatory step for getting "In Water," as it was in the original SH2.

• Do not inspect Mary's Letter or the Photo of Mary.

• Spend at least 10 minutes total at critical health (<50%, visible blood on James' jacket). Do not hurry to heal James unless you're at immediate risk of death and try to heal as little as possible when you do. Behave as if James does not care what happens to him.
• Hypothesis: this also may be tied to the sheer amount of damage that James has taken by the end of the game. After a new run on Standard combat difficulty in which James had taken over 4,600 damage but had not focused on any of the other criteria, inspecting Angela's Knife was enough to push us over from "Leave" to "In Water."

• Inspect the writing on the wall above the jukebox in Otherworld Neely's Bar.

• Read the file in the utility hut on the roof of Brookhaven Hospital.

• Minimize the amount of time you spend with Maria, as above. Try to get her hit by enemies when you're with her in Western South Vale.

• In the long hallway after your fight with the dual Pyramid Heads, listen to the entire conversation before leaving.

"In Water" is a little easier to get than it used to be. Playing with the combat difficulty on Hard gives you a lot more opportunities to get James soundly thrashed. If you get "in Water," you unlock the trophy/achievement Only Way Out.

For achievement hunters, SH2R only cares whether you've seen an ending, not that you've played through the entire game up to that point. Depending on how your game has gone, it may be possible for you to keep a save at the start of the Lakeview Hotel, then play around with various criteria along the way and get enough credit to earn a new ending. As noted above, we found that the remake apparently gives you so many points towards "In Water" for your initial examination of Angela's Knife that we were able to replay the hotel and get a different ending.

These are the only 3 endings you can get on Normal Mode. If you're looking for something more elaborate, you'll need to play through again on New Game+.