(1/12) Alright, I'm going to talk about the early version of Silent Hill: The Short Message, aka Sakura. This thread is mostly to go over some early concepts that were changed for the final. From the outset, "A game about resisting anxiety and oppression to help stop suicide"

(2/12) was always the mission statement of the game & what it'd be tackling. I'm not sure it's ever stated in-game, but Anita Planert is supposed to be 17-years old. She's at the bottom of her classes "hierarchy", considered a geek & a loser, who has a bad home life & who's cut

(3/12) herself many times in the past. One of her only friends is a classmate name Maya Hindenburg, who recently committed suicide. Maya was far more popular in their class, but a bit of a weirdo. Anita a week after her friend's suicide goes to the apartment complex the death

(4/12) occurred in. There's many strange rumors about this place. In the original version, a group of Anita's classmates known as delinquents were holding a party that night "in honor" of Maya, & wrecking the place & leaving graffiti. In the original, there were a LOT more

(5/12) characters you interacted with. Anita fairly early in would find Maya's phone, and begin texting Maya's contacts & group chats to try to learn what happened to Maya. Such as in this image where a guy named Leon is confused getting a message from Maya's phone, Anita tells

(6/12) him she's Maya's friend, & another girl named Clara tells Leon not to talk to her, calling Anita "the stinky geek girl" from their class. The game was still split into three phases, with the first two phases ending with Anita jumping off the apartment roof, but the

(7/12) specifics differed quite a bit. In the first phase, Anita mostly would be solving "puzzles" by contacting people to try & piece things together. Some would only help her if she did things for them, like in this picture Amelie is asking Anita to take a picture of a drawing

(8/12) Maya had made, while another example is someone less fond of Anita wanting her to take a "daring" scary photo & then they'll talk. Finding certain objects in the environment would also unlock "keywords" which you could use to message contacts to try & get more information

(9/14) out of them. Anita begins to learn new sides of Maya, & a disturbing truth begins to surface. Anita finds a boy Maya was secretly seeing who she thinks "drove" Maya to suicide, accuses him on social media, & thinks she's solved the case, but then a weird painting grips

(10/14) inside her mind, she jumps off the roof, then awakens back inside the apartment unable to escape. During the 2nd loop, the place begins to devolve further, & a dark secret of the town they live in begins to get unearthed. A classmate says the words, "The Witch's Curse",

(11/15) which strikes anxiety within Anita, & she begins to see the Sakura monster at this point. Interestingly, a lot of specific plot points I'm about to say are still kinda' in the final game, but WAY in the background. There becomes evidence of a "ritual" that was happening,

(12/15) that a number of students & even some teachers in their school were part of some weird cult. More evidence comes out that certain online rabbit holes had been pushing extremist religious ideas online that had been gaining a small amount of traction, & begin to fester &

(13/16) in their local community due to an old xenophobic belief in their town of a "witch" who came from Asia in the early 1900s, & had made Maya & Anita targets for having Asian heritance, with some of the class believing them to be witches. Maya was already unpopular, & was

(14/17) chosen by some of the class as a "sacrifice" for the "Stone Castle" ritual. Anita's bullying was already there, but people with ulterior motives from the cult wanted to tear her down even more to isolate & prey on her to draw her to the apartments to carry out the ritual.

(15/17) But the ritual failed after Maya herself took interest in the space, & an interest in deaths that had happened here, & the suffering of young girls. For the record, I actually understand some of why they changed this. Bringing the cult into it, and being more actively

(16/18) involved in Maya's suicide could send the wrong message, & I think they chose to make the plot less convoluted with so many characters (originally you text something like 23 different people I think) to instead just focus on 3 core characters, & make the story have a more

(17/18) positive message at the end, not play suicide as the way of a ritual (even though there is some predance to it in the series itself), & focus on a more grounded story since suicide doesn't need a cult behind it to happen. And I can appreciate that. Though it would've been

(18/18) nice to see more on the class, expansion on the cult post the Silent Hill phenomena & trying to grow numbers by radicalization online, plus the original stuff where the space around Sakura would dynamically change into sticky notes I think was a cool visual. Is what it is

yes