okay gonna try and put this into words because it kind of made me insane the other day but basically. rain world and 17776 both deal with the concept of "what if people lived forever" and take it in completely different directions. 17776 has humanity, suddenly gifted with infinite time, solve all of their problems, and ultimately decide that they're happiest living the simple, mundane lives they've always lived. meanwhile in rain world, the ancients viewed their endless reincarnation as a Great Problem to be solved. the game goes to great lengths to show the ancients as pompous and shortsighted, and shows almost all their attempts at transcending as a failure, due to their inability to move past the material world. their greatest attempt to solve this problem, the iterators, literally wreck their world's ecosystem before eventually falling to ruin. so you have humanity in 17776, who are thriving in their immortality by embracing what they love about their world and each other, and then the ancients in rain world, who failed to embrace the nature of their lives and eventually vanished from existence. i guess you could call that two opposite directions taken for the same central theme, of not reaching too far and being grateful for what you have?
moving past civilization and focusing on the robots. 17776 has the space probes, and rain world has the iterators; both occupy similar roles, as machines built by their respective civilizations to accomplish a task, but over the course of time their task has become null and now they have no real purpose to continue existing. 17776 takes this with its typical joyful tone; nine, ten and juice are free to live their lives as they please, using their time to delight in humanity's shenanigans and in each other. meanwhile, the iterators continue striving to solve their now meaningless problem, working endlessly, in some cases literally to their deaths. something about the perpetuation of cycles perhaps? humanity was able to accept their lives as they were and so are the space probes, but the ancients' hubris carries over into their creations. idk someone write an essay about this im sure theres more to say if you think about it
