alone in the town wrote:There are several major problem with the idea that James is leaving himself messages.
1. He would have to know, beforehand, that he would re-live the experience repeatedly.
2. Armed with that knowledge, you'd expect that the information he leaves behind would be more frequent and informative. Also, he would be able to pre-guess the outcome, and the delusion would not withstand that knowledge.
3. It would also involve backtracking to the locations where the info is left, because if he knew beforehand that he would have to go to the Apartments and Pete's, he would always know beforehand every time events repeated, and the act of leaving maps would be unnecessary.
4. Everybody else in the game must either be trapped in the same loop, or are figments of his imagination.
5. There would have to be some causative factor for events repeating.
6. Such repetition would essentially render the entire adventure meaningless.
Well, how about this: he has no idea he is being forced to relive the events over and over, but each time he doesn't succeed (i.e. dies), the corpse is left where it dropped.
Each different James made different decisions and so reached a different milestone:
James dead in the street decided to take notes, but went a little crazy. He found a different James' (dead at the bridge) note for whoever lived in the trailer and was on his way to the bar and ended up getting gored to death by a monster.
James dead in the alley found the key to the apartment but got trapped by the StraitJacket in the alley because he never got the wooden plank, and so he got partially eaten.
James in the apartment, the gun room, found a back way into the apartment but, after getting the gun, began seeing bugs all over the walls, tried to shoot all of them, ran out of ammo, and barricaded himself in a side room, presumably getting eaten by the bugs in there, too.
James in the apartment, the clock passage room, also made it into the apartment through a back way, but reached a dead end at the clock. He said "fuck it," set down the key he found on a shelf, pulled up an armchair to the TV, turned it on, and Pyramid Head smashed his face into the TV for giving in. This signalled the other James to come find him.
And the last Dead James had a map listing all these places Mary might be. She wasn't at Rosewater Park, but she might've been at the Hotel, or even at the Bowling alley! He made it to the bridge, but was cornered by some LadiesLegs and pummeled to death.
(I might've missed a few, sorry)
Each James' successive choices, discoveries, and actions accumulated until James was finally able to make it to the Hotel without dying.
...Well, that's my theory, anyhow.