The terminology arrives formally here, the game naming what the BTs actually are rather than leaving them as environmental hazards. Beached things. Souls that could not complete the crossing, that remain in the living world without being of it, that generate the timefall and the voidout and the ecological catastrophe of the Stranding because they are matter in the wrong state, present where they should not be present. South Knot City is the largest population center Sam has reached, which means it is surrounded by the largest concentration of beached things, which means it is the game's first full demonstration of what civilization looks like when it has learned to exist inside the haunting.

The people of South Knot City are not afraid of the BTs in the way the early game's smaller communities are afraid. They have adapted. The adaptation is its own kind of horror — the normalization of the impossible, the daily management of souls that cannot leave, the city built around the fact of the dead's continued presence.