The condition that stranded half of Bridget's soul is the game's first serious engagement with what the Stranding actually is — not a geological or biological event but a cosmological one, the boundary between the living world and the beach becoming permeable in ways that the human body was not designed to navigate. Half a soul stranded means half present, half elsewhere, the person you are talking to always partly somewhere you cannot follow.

Sam carries this as inheritance. His relationship to the beach, his DOOMS ability, his status as a repatriate — all of it traces back to a mother whose condition made the boundary personal rather than abstract. The Stranding is not something that happened to Bridget. It is something she was already living with when the world caught up to her particular circumstance.