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Review
What Room 206 has going for it, mostly, is its story. The small handful of puzzles are well-done enough, but they're not going to challenge most puzzle aficionados (and I have the feeling I've seen one of them, (Spoiler - click to show)the "follow the lights in the void" maze, somewhere before). The main reason to keep going through the game (and its endless "wait" commands and occasional guess-the-verb issues) is to find out what exactly is happening to its protagonist.
In a work like this, then, the writing is of utmost importance, and Room 206 doesn't do quite as well as it might in this regard. In some places, the poetic, somewhat disjointed prose works well to establish a surreal and nightmarish atmosphere; often, though, it falls into "ridiculous purple prose" territory, trainwrecks of mixed metaphors and similes leaving the reader wondering what exactly they're trying to convey. One example I found particularly egregious:
"Accompanying this gypsy theatre of scents, other sensations hang weights and baubles from the darkness. [...] In the middle of all this, thronged by the shapeless muscle like a flock of angels, wrapped in icy moonbeams, a man sits."
What is this description trying to get at? What does "thronged by the shapeless muscle like a flock of angels" even mean? Can someone really be said, even metaphorically, to be thronged by their own muscles? Unless the "muscle" part is a further metaphor describing something else altogether...
In addition to the general figurative language overload and thesaurus abuse, there were a couple of cases of words being used incorrectly, like "contemptibly" used where I'm pretty sure "contemptuously" was meant.
This prose style can interfere with the playing of the game itself; room descriptions are often walls of text, giving a lot of extraneous information and making it easy to overlook things that actually are important. I spent a lot of time trying to examine things that weren't implemented.
Flaws aside, however, the story itself is definitely intriguing, and while some aspects of the twist might be easy to guess, it's much more complicated than it may appear. The mysterious phone calls raise more questions even as they give clues to the game's larger mystery (at one point they're also used to give smoothly integrated in-game hints to a puzzle's solution, which works well). The endings leave the player with much to think about, but still feel like fitting conclusions to the narrative.
Overall, I did enjoy the game and found many of its ideas intriguing. I just feel like it could perhaps have used an editor or beta-reader to curb some of the writer's wilder flights into overblown descriptions.
