Common Ground: One Night in a Three-story House

Common Ground: One Night in a Three-story House is the story of a poor suburban family told interactively through text.

(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)

A three-chapter game (with an epilogue) in which you're a different character in each chapter. The twist is that each chapter covers roughly the same space of time, and you interact with the other two characters, to varying degrees, when you're in each pair of shoes. The gameplay is a bit restrictive--the game doesn't allow for a lot of variation--but the characters themselves are well developed and the interactions feel reasonably realistic. The game even does a passable job of recording the actions you take when you're one character and playing them back when you're a different character, observing the antics of the first. Very short--20-30 minutes to play through at most--but worth playing; it largely eschews puzzles in favor of character interaction in a way that little IF attempts.

(Source: Review by Duncan Stevens, BAF's guide to the IF Archive)