Starmaker: 1. "Bros before hos" is a terrible lesson to teach.
I definitely agree with that. I didn't get that from the ending, but you've clearly thought about it much more deeply. I think I kind of just skated the surface metaphors, whereas there is more below to be gleaned.
Starmaker: 2. The altar and the cave don't make sense together.
Afraid I don't recall enough about the game to argue either side of this. :)
Starmaker: 3. Bodies don't work like that! Look, I get "magic". I love magic, I love [awesome], but where the plot implicitly or explicitly intersects with reality, reality has to fucking win, especially if the departure from reality goes against the player's interests. It's a big pet peeve of mine, it touches on science, philosophy, ethics, [trans]humanism, etc. Fiction is important, it's a blueprint of the future in a way; and all fiction informs people's understanding of the world to an extent. This trope is Not Good.
I don't think magic and physics have to be at loggerheards in a fictional setting, but I do believe ground rules should exist as to how they interact, and in what ways one has sway over the other. I agree it's bad storytelling to violate your own logic or result on
deus ex machina resolutions. I don't like it when an otherwise well-told story is undone by tugging on one weak plot thread that causes the whole primary motivation to unravel. Again, I didn't get that feeling from this game, but it sounds like I may not have examined it to the level it deserved, as it was trying to tell a rather deep tale.
[SPOILER BELOW] EDIT: And just to clarify, it wasn't the tree portion of the ending that I thought was what worked. It was simply the death that I found effective. To me it short-circuited the convention of "complete this quest and all will be well", and instead placed it into a framework of consequence and even powerlessness. I found it laudable for a game to expose the player to those mechanisms, when so often games offer a dream of power or clear-cut purpose.