There is no bad ending

I've been meaning to write this for a time now, since I've seen some posts like "why did I get the bad ending?" Or "I thought I was doing well but I still got the worst ending". I'm talking, of course, about "In water" ending.

Well, mechanically there are lots of pages that can show you how to get or avoid this ending, I won't talk about them. Instead, I will talk about the endings.

First of all, there are not good or bad endings. The different "canon" endings (this is, all of them but Dog and UFO) reflect on the way James feels about Mary's death. Regarding endings, I think the most popular are Leave and In Water (Masahiro Ito, monster designer of the game, said those are his favourites). In Leave, James acknowledges his mistakes and is able to forgiving himself for what he did, ready to continue with his life but without forgetting Mary. That's why he's able to leave the city but he does it with Laura, presumably to adopt her as per Mary's wish.

On the other hand, we have In water. In this case, James feels remorse and guilt about what he's done, and he finds himself unable to live without Mary. So, as was his initial wish, he throws himself in the lake to be reunited with Mary in death. This is also related with the Japanese concept of Muri-Shinju, or homicide suicide. He intends to clean his fault and reuniting with his wife in a single act.

So, what I'm trying to point out is that there's no bad ending. If anything you can talk about happy endings and sad endings, but definitely nothing about bad endings.

Also, Masahiro Ito also said that even there is no canon ending, the In Water ending feels the most natural, so there's that.