Common Ground

5 star: (1) 4 star: (9) 3 star: (14) 2 star: (4) 1 star: (1)

Average Rating: Number of Ratings: 29 Write a review

- Kake (London, England), November 25, 2007

- Emily Short, October 22, 2007

- James Jolley (Peterborough, United Kingdom), October 22, 2007

I enjoyed Common Ground well enough that it was hard to leave the game to do the other things I needed to do for the day.

However, it has several odd flaws, most notably a few instances of technically poor writing. While I place story, characters, and gameplay very highly in my list of qualities to judge a work of IF by, language errors are terribly distracting for me. If this does not trouble you, I would recommend Common Ground very highly.

If you share in my distraction caused by little errors, I recommend it anyway, especially if you want to play a short, easy game with an interestingly and unusually told story as well as well-developed characters.

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Baf's Guide

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.

-- Duncan Stevens