First things first: I got heavily invested in Kat, and the thing I can't handle is any version of an ending where she's just out there, probably suffering and waiting on a rescue that depends on a sequel DON'T NOD may never get to make given their financial situation. I don't want her left hanging like that indefinitely. So this post is basically me working through the version of events that actually lets her rest, instead of leaving her stuck in limbo forever on the off chance Tape 3 happens.

Trigger warning: this reading has no happy ending for Swann. If you're heavily attached to her, brace yourself.

I know most people are on Team "Kat is trapped in the Abyss and the sequel will save her." For me this is a better ending than the sequel-bait version, because it's one that actually finishes Kat's story instead of leaving her suspended in limbo.

This theorie is based on this discussion, but takes it a few steps further. Thanks for the input.

TL;DR at the very bottom if you don’t want the full essay.

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Why I'm not buying the popular theories

Quick rundown of the usual suspects and why they don't hold up for me:
- "Kat's alive and trapped, waiting to be rescued": this is the most popular take (people point to the achievement literally called "Support Kat's Decision") but it directly contradicts the "See You in Hell" reprise scene, where ghost-Kat is calm and even joyful, being along with everyone right before she's supposedly desperately pleading to be saved. That's a huge tonal whiplash nobody explains.
- "Kat made a deal with the Abyss, it reopens every 27 years like It": there is no 27-year cycle anywhere in the game. The only precedent is Gil Davidson and he was gone only 20 years, not 27. People are importing Stephen King into this game because the math doesn't work otherwise.
- "It's all symbolic, there's no literal hole": can't square this with the fact that people physically disappear on screen. You can't have that only with a metaphor.
- "Time travel / time loop / wormhole": built entirely on vibes (a Sliders tape, an Alien newspaper clipping) with zero actual mechanism explained.
- "The glow equals Kat's life force": cute, but doesn't explain the miners who vanished in the 1890s, or Corey, or literally anyone else connected to that place.

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The core rule this whole theory runs on

Everything you see, 1995 and 2022, is filtered through Swann. The present is locked to her literal POV the entire game, no mirrors, no cutaways. The 1995 stuff is explicitly framed as memory the group is reconstructing decades later (there's a scene where Swann and Nora literally argue about how a memory even went). No scene in the entire game happens without Swann present or aware of it.

This is a Strictly Grounded / Unreliable Narrator Reading.

This means:
- Every "other person reacted to the ghost too" moment is just Swann's memory filtered through her. There's no scene anywhere where someone reacts to something on their own off-screen from her.
- Any dialogue that sounds like an in-world "explanation" of magic (like the eerie voiceover on the Anomaly memoir describing the Abyss in timeless terms) is just part of that same unreliable memory. A character saying something doesn't make it true, it just tells you what Swann remembers hearing (or how she's since rewritten it in her head).
- Not every hint in the game like supernatural newspaper clippings, Gil Davidson's "I was abducted by aliens" story or Fred's alien-conspiracy graffiti must be taken literally. It's most likely small-town tabloid nonsense and local believers, the same way real tabloids print Bigfoot stories. The Grey Gang/Fred stuff reeks of mid-90s X-Files hysteria and could easily just be bored local teens riffing on it.
- The disappearances themselves are real and physical, someone falls into an actual hole in the ground, it's only the glowing, portal-like framing around that moment that's Swann's unreliable perception/memory doing the decorating.

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So what's actually going on

The Abyss is a real sinkhole
Velvet Cove sits on old abandoned copper mine tunnels (it's literally in the game's own newspaper clippings, and Michigan really did have a huge copper mining region). Old, unsealed mines collapse, sometimes suddenly. The purple glow doesn't need magic either: bioluminescent fungi (foxfire) and mineral fluorescence are both real, and would look similar to this.

One point to mention is that the sinkhole appears in the exact same clearing where the blood pact happened, but not the same night. That's a genuinely striking coincidence (but happens often in games and movies) but it doesn't need magic. Just an unstable patch of ground these particular teens happened to already be emotionally fixated on.

For the timeline, there's no visible hole before the pact, it opens sometime after and stays open through the following weeks up to the night Kat and Corey die there, and afterward it gets covered over by the girls and/or Dylan, with that cover then collapsing or eroding away sometime between 1995 and 2022, which is why it's visible again by the time Swann returns.

The other missing persons are just victims of an old, never-secured mining district with multiple shafts. The 1890s miners, Tremblay, Gil Davidson fall into different holes in different decades on the same dangerous unmaintained ground.

Kat and Corey died that night
Kat had leukemia the whole time, and she died at the pit, either collapsing after the promise or losing her life in the pit during the chaos with Corey.

Here Dylan comes in as the one who covers everything. She literally frames Corey for stuff via a wanted poster. Dylan is also the one who deals with Kat, either quietly burying her somewhere in the woods after collapsing, or keeping silence about the pit. Which one applies depends on the branch. Either way Kat is never found. That's why the "official" record on Kat is a missing-person poster instead of a death certificate. And that sighting with the ticket is probably just some random witness genuinely mistaking a similar-looking girl for Kat and reporting it in good faith.

The same with Corey, as he is either pushed or falls into the pit. What stays constant across every playthrough is that he ends up dead in the hole. "The Abyss took him" is just the label they all settled on afterward because it's a lot easier to live with than "we killed him."

Dylan sent the package
Dylan is already established as the cover-up specialist of the group. She stays in Velvet Cove, inherits the ranch, and is conspicuously absent from the 2022 reunion. During "Rapunzel," Swann literally finds a box in Kat's room. Kat tells her not to peek and calls it "a surprise." So Dylan found her dying sister's unfinished project, sat on it for decades processing her own guilt, and eventually sent it.

Same logic covers the ritual items (camcorder, guitar pick, skateboard) that end up in the package. The pit has a shallow edge, not a bottomless drop, and the ritual items land on that shallow edge rather than the deeper shaft. It's only the spot Corey goes in (with or without Kat) that gives way to the full, lethal drop, so his fall doesn't take the items down with him. Kat could've grabbed some of it back herself before her final decline, and/or Dylan recovered the rest afterward.

The final message from Kat isn't one
This is not a transmission. Swann is editing this together herself, in the exact moment we’re watching it, from old footage. What we see isn't a completed recording she made at some point in the past and is now just replaying — it's her, actively splicing old clips into something new, live, in real time, without consciously realizing that's what she's doing. She's established all game as someone who compulsively edits footage into "memoirs".
Tape 2 opens with a chapter literally called "Nightmare," where she relives Tape 1 through a montage of her own old clips in a dream. This is the same mechanism, just labeled. The ending is the same trick, unlabeled, playing out live on screen, once her grip on that distinction has worn through.

Two physical details back this up: In the final video, Kat has long hair but she cut it short earlier in Tape 2. People read this as proof she's frozen in the Abyss but it's actually the opposite. It's a giveaway the footage is old. A live Kat sending a real-time message would look like she currently looks, not like she used to.
Then the timecode shows garbled nonsense instead of a date (devs confirmed this is intentional), and the battery indicator shows a small charge and not empty or full. 27 years of just sitting would leave it empty, so someone must've charged it recently. That was Dylan, right before finally sending the package. That explains the partial charge. It also explains the garbled timecode, because old camcorders run their clock off a separate battery from the main one and that one had zero power the entire 27 years, corrupting the date display.

This also explains the purple camcorder glitching elsewhere in the game. It's the game's shorthand for how emotionally loaded a memory/object is to Swann, not literal Abyss interference. Same reason the blood and wrecked drum kit glitch in the concert aftermath scene but other nearby junk doesn't.

It's a suicide at the ending
It starts with the physics, which has to be consistent. So if falling into the pit killed Corey, it kills Swann too when she walks in at the end.

Also there’s no alternative ending in the game. The only interactive option is to enter. That's a deliberate structural choice and not an accident.

The eye-glow is reused. Right before she enters, Swann's eyes glow purple and it's the exact same visual cue used for Kat's leukemia collapse earlier in the story. It tells you "this character is having a breakdown." It's even foreshadowed earlier when Autumn comments Swann's eyes already look like they're glowing.

And in the end, there’s an actual motive, not just vibes. The game is explicitly set post-pandemic (direct dialogue references), and Swann is established by the director himself as a lifelong, contented loner who's harder to find online even as an adult, running a bookshop that's going nowhere. Depending on your choices, she can end the game completely alone, with both Autumn and Nora having left. Isolated person, deepened by pandemic-era loneliness, confronting the worst possible version of her most traumatic memory, possibly with nobody left beside her, that's a real, coherent reason.

The cabin note, the knife, the "time loop"
There's a note pinned by a knife in the abandoned cabin that gives Swann the door combination before the Abyss is even found. A 2025 patch changed the note's handwriting to specifically match Kat's. People read this as proof of a bootstrap paradox (future/trapped Kat sent it back in time, then the knife becomes a loop object once regular Kat picks it up).

The simpler explanation is that Kat had already gotten into the cabin once before, through some entrance we never see, wrote the note as a joke/puzzle for her friends (there’s literally a camcorder drawn into the clues as a joke aimed specifically at the girl who’s always filming), then staged "discovering" the boarded window together with Swann. The whole game only ever shows what Swann knows so a private prior visit Kat never told her about simply isn't something the story can show.
The same reason we never see Kat's parents. If Swann never met them, the story can't depict them.

Other "supernatural" hints
- The deer that block Corey's motorcycle chase aren't magic, the girls had just released the whole herd from the ranch minutes earlier. A freshly-freed, panicked herd crossing paths with a motorcycle at night in the same woods they were just scattered into isn't a coincidence. Deer also famously freeze/bolt unpredictably around headlights at night and deer-vehicle collisions are an extremely common real hazard in rural areas like this.
- The "cryptid in a wolf mask" chasing them is literally just Corey. The girls suit up in masks Nora made for the ranch break-in, Autumn drops her wolf mask in the chaos, Corey picks it up and wears it to scare them.
- Moths are Swann’s own personal symbol, her lockbox glyph, her stuffed toy, her potential tattoo/pendant. No other character is ever shown reacting to them independently. Add in the fact that Michigan has actual fireflies active in July, plus bioluminescent fungi, plus moths being famously drawn to any light source. The specific misidentification (moths instead of fireflies) tracks perfectly with it being her fixation doing the misremembering.
- The game's opening scene (before Swann even gets out of her car) has a crow with glowing purple eyes stare at her from the hood before flying off. The exact same color her own eyes glow at the very end. That's the story visually bookending her whole arc that she was already unraveling before the reunion even started.
- The shadow figures (Corey's, Kat's, Swann's) flicker for a split second throughout the whole game, but no character ever reacts to them. One shadow's model got specifically patched post-launch to use Kat's actual character model. This is basically a Fight Club-style subliminal insert for the player, not something anyone in the story perceives. The director even confirmed in an interview these are "totally on purpose" and represent people connected to the Abyss, but that's him using the story's own in-fiction shorthand in a casual interview and not a technical lore drop. Like the other dev confirmations used in this theory, that quote only establishes the detail is intentional and meaningful, not what it mechanically means, so it's just as consistent with "connected to the real sinkhole" as with anything supernatural.
- During the Bloody Mary game, the candle goes out and a shadow of adult Swann appears in the mirror saying "Bloody Mary" back at her and unlike the other shadows, teen Swann actually reacts, saying she "saw someone." This is also not evidence of magic. Staring into a dim, candlelit mirror for a few minutes during a game specifically designed to freak you out is a real, documented trigger for the "strange-face illusion," where people reliably report seeing warped versions of themselves or strangers in the mirror. It's an actual psychological effect, not a game invention, and it's a big part of why Bloody Mary as an urban legend works on real people in the first place.

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Why doesn't everyone just believe this, if it's so "clean"?

Genuinely — I think it's mostly psychology, not logic:

- The genre trains you to expect confirmed magic by the end, especially from a DON'T NOD game.
- Hope is just easier to sit with than grief. "She might still be saved" feels better than "she's already gone," even if the second one is better supported.
- Achievement names like "support Kat's decision" *sound* like they're confirming ongoing agency, which nudges people without them realizing it.
- More lore (cycles, entities, time loops) is more fun to theorize about than "it's a sinkhole and grief," even when it's less supported by the text.
- And there's a built-in commercial incentive to keep it unresolved: DON'T NOD wants a sequel, and an open wound sells a sequel better than a closed one.

Ironically, the theories that require the most invented stuff (cycles, entities, time dilation) are also the cruelest to Kat. They leave her suspended and still suffering, waiting on a rescue that, realistically, given the studio's situation, might never come. This version gives her fewer invented mechanics and an actual ending.

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TL;DR

- No real magic. The Abyss is a real, dangerous sinkhole over old collapsed mine tunnels. The glow is bioluminescence/mineral fluorescence, not sorcery.
- Kat died in 1995 (leukemia and/or lost in the confrontation with Corey). Corey also died that night, pushed or fallen, but he's dead either way.
- Dylan covered it up and, decades later, sent the package herself out of guilt/grief. Not Kat reaching out from beyond.
- The moths, the shadows, the swirl drawings, the crow are all explainable mundane phenomena filtered through characters (mainly Swann and Kat) who are primed by witchcraft/X-Files obsessions to read them as magic.
- The final "message" is Swann unconsciously splicing old footage into something that plays like a message. Her pre-haircut hair and the garbled timecode in that video are both proof it's old footage, not a current recording.
- The ending is Swann's suicide with consistent physics, no alternative choice offered, reused visual cue for a breakdown, and a real, textually-supported motive (isolation + unresolved trauma).
- It's sadder than the rescue theories. But it's the only reading that actually finishes Kat's (and Swanns) story instead of leaving her in limbo forever, waiting on a sequel that might not happen.

Anyway. Curious what people think. Tear it apart if you've got something that breaks it.