The plot is by-the-numbers garbage until the end of the third map. The player has very little, if any, control over the plot. The story focuses around a conflict between the natives of the Living Lands (who are in touch with nature and such), and the Steel Garrotte, a brutal group of colonial fascists who are going around hanging people and razing places. It's incredibly boring.
At the end of the third act, a few things happen:
- Sapadal, the god entity in your head (that the writers desperately want you to sympathise with, often forcing you to pick dialogue options that express your love and support for it), turns out to be the cause of the plague you're trying to fix.
- Inquisitor Lodwyn, the villain who until now has been an entirely one-dimensional cardboard cutout, tries to reason with you by telling you the truth about your god and asking you to destroy it.
- There's the game's one and only impressive piece of long-term reactivity here - Lodwyn will ally with you or attack you depending on your previous actions, and judges you on your response to three previous incidents.
The fourth map is then mostly pointless busywork, until:
- You enter the Garden, where Sapadal is trapped. Here, the world design and encounter design goes completely to shit and you're forced to fight a number of spongey bosses.
- You are given the choice to destroy Sapdal or let it live. Like the rest of the game, this choice feels quite awkwardly implemented, and characters seem to have largely the same responses whatever you do. Destroying it grants you one special power. I think Sapadal's dialogue might change depending on your own actions, but obviously I can't be sure.
- After this, you return to the starting city to find out that, for no real reason at all, Lodwyn has set it on fire in the name of the Empire. This doesn't really follow on from anything else - the real plot ends in the Garden, but since that was boring, this is here to give the game a big dramatic final setpiece. This situation appears to happen totally regardless of what you've done in the entire game so far; again you'd have to ask someone who played very differently to me if it went differently for them.
- Regardless of everything you've done up to this point, the game gives you the basic choice of "side with Lodywn and the Steel Garrotte" or "side with the natives". This choice is totally void of meaning because:
a) you've been forced to side against Lodwyn for the entire game up until the end of the third act (up to and including killing a large number of Steel Garrotte, who tend to attack on sight)
b) all your companions tell you not to do this, and you're not given any in-character or in-universe reason to do it
c) the choice comes down to a single binary dialogue option. You can suddenly and inexplicably swear fealty to the cartoon villains you've been slaughtering up to this point, or you can decide to be a cool rebel and push the empire you represent out of the mystical nature island they're trying to massacre. Both options come despite everything you've said and done up in the preceding 18 hours.
It's hard to get across how dumb this scenario is without showing you the whole game leading up to it, but suffice to say - there is absolutely no motivation whatsoever for you to do anything other than side against the Steel Garrotte, as you already necessarily have about fifteen times before.
- For context, I kept spiting the game by picking the most pro-Steel Garrotte dialogue options throughout, on the scant few occasions they were available. The devs didn't really expect you to do this because it leads to some very funny dialogue with your companions in this scene - one who had her city burned down by the Steel Garrotte earlier says "I never thought you'd do this! I guess I never really knew you after all!" This is despite the fact that I looked her dead in the eye as her home burned and said "I think the Steel Garrotte have a point here"*. Yeah no shit you didn't know me mate, you never listened to a word I fucking said.
*they didn't have a point at all, for the record - they were being Skeletor-tier comedy villains as usual
- Regardless of who you side with, you have to fight through the same map filled with the same enemies, only their faction is different depending on who you have sided with. If you chose Lodwyn, your companions all abandon you, meaning you have to do it alone (which is a bit more exciting, I suppose). This is, oddly, easier and shorter than the combat in the Garden, even if you're doing it alone.
- Lodwyn is waiting for you on either route, and immediately prepares to attack you, again entirely regardless of your previous actions up to this point. You can say you want to join her, or you can kill her; either route ends the game. You then get ending slides because, of course, New Vegas had them so this needs them too. Like the rest of the game, the ending slides end up a bit confused if you didn't do what the devs wanted you to do - I became Lodwyn's second-in-command and we "ruled the colony with an iron fist" and hanged dissidents or something, but also the colony simultaneously flourished and became a utopia because I did enough sidequests for merchants during the game.
