Byron Alexander Campbell's "Room 206" was released a while ago in ALAN3, and according to a current thread on rec.games.int-fiction he is working on an Inform7 implementation of the game. This review is based on the ALAN3 version and has mainly only mild spoilers. More straightforward spoilers will be marked below.
As to its length, the game is rather extensive - easily longer than the average IF Comp game and maybe the longest ALAN3 game produced. In the beginning of the game we find the hero in a chapel right after a wedding. Curiously, he can't seem to find his newly-wed wife anywhere; she has gone outside the chapel a bit before him to say goodbye to the guests. Outside, however, there is just an empty limousine waiting, as well as the empty chapel grounds with no people around. Initially, you only seem able to wander around the few locations in and around the chapel. Soon, however, it becomes evident that there is more to this story than meets the eye. You begin to get hints of everything not being quite right when you find a ladies' shoe - instead of, say, a bottle of champagne - in an ice bucket in the limousine, and other similar things. From there on it's an unpredictable ride with lots of twists and turns. The game turns out to have a rather sinister and disturbing plot and could be classified as a horror story.
After finishing it I was not exactly sure what had actually happened - or if anything had happened yet. In this respect, the game resembles this year's comp game "The Blind House". After playing, the game needs to sink in for a while for the player to form his/her own interpretation of it. The walkthrough also says there are four different endings (I only played through one of them).
The game uses a somewhat unconventional way of moving around. The compass directions don't work; instead, you should supply the name of the location you wish to go to. For example, if you are outside the chapel and wish to go in, you type 'chapel'. ('Up' and 'down' work, as does 'out', whereas 'in' doesn't which is a bit confusing). Also, 'out' doesn't work always, for example when you're in the limousine; to get back out to the chapel lawn, you'll have to type 'lawn' which took me some time to figure out. It would help to make these directions work more consistently.
The prose is quite competent and elaborate throughout: you'll get descriptions like
"There are some rusted tin cans tied to the rear fender [of the limousine],an oddly archaic touch to the otherwise sleek, ambiguous modernity of the vehicle.",
"The bougainvillea that had clung there in summers past is now lifeless and disinterested, its browning tendrils coming unwound",
etc. There are only a few misspellings here and there (e.g. 'personel', 'disshevelled', or a missing full stop somewhere)) but these are few and far between enough to not distract from the overall experience.
THIS PARAGRAPH CONTAINS SPOILERS:
The pacing of the game works well enough; the plot won't move forward until you've accomplished certain things. On the other hand, I had to refer to the walkthrough particularly during the latter part of the game as many times there seemed to be nothing obvious to do (which is also evident in the walkthrough where there are several 'wait' commands in various places). In these places, things could happen in a tighter tempo, or then, what needs to be done could be clued a bit more clearly. For example, needing to put things into the purse was not clear at first, even if in hindsight I could see that there were clues that hinted at it. Most often, though, the clues were sufficient and straightforward. Sometimes an action has a misguiding response before a certain point: in the hotel room, there's alump in your pillow. Trying to open the pillow, however, yields "You can't open that!" but after a while, when you find another object, opening the pillow is possible and even crucial to the advancement of the plot. Sometimes, there is a 'guess the verb' dilemma: To manipulate a tray outside your hotel room door, you need to 'flip over tray'. To cure your headache you need to 'swallow pills with liquor'. These couple of passages could benefit from accepting more ordinary verbs.
(END OF SPOILERS.)
There is a hunger/thirst/headache factor in the game that seems quite superfluous and doesn't bring anything essential to the game. It feels more like an exercise in coding than anything else.
At one point of the game when a telephone in the hotel room keeps ringing, there are responses for 'answer phone' that seem like bugs - sentence fragments from earlier in the game, combined to often incomprehensible, even if grammatically passable, sentences. I am not certain if they are bugs or deliberate decisions of style (where different things pass through the
protagonist's mind). If they are a deliberate formulation, they could be formulated in a way that makes them stand out a bit more clearly from just bugs. Another buggy moment was when I was outside the hotel and typed 'x blue bottle' I got the description of the police officer instead.
As I already said, the ending is ambiguous and open to interpretations; this is probably the author's intention. The imagery towards the end is quite disturbing and uneasy. The atmosphere in the game grows all the time towards more frightening. If you're into that type of games, then this is a perfect one for you. All in all, this is a game well worth playing, so be sure to give it a try!
Verdict: 3,5 / 5 (= Some bugs and guess-the-verb moments but overall solid and competent prose with an interesting storyline open to interpretations.)