Waking up[edit]
You begin the game inside of a bathroom stall with no memory of how you got there. All you notice are puncture marks in your arm. You will be staring at a coat hanging on the door. TAKE the coat. Once you do, you will notice that a gun was hanging behind the coat. TAKE the gun. If you examine the coat, you will notice it has a pocket. OPEN the pocket. Inside are a variety of things, very few of which are useful. You should TAKE the coins in order to have them handy. There is also a wallet. You will need to OPEN the wallet to discover its contents. Inside the wallet, you will find a key, a card, and a $20 bill. TAKE all of these items.
To get out of the stall, OPEN the door and MOVE through it. In the bathroom, you will notice a mirror. If you examine it, you will realize that you can't remember who you are. (In the NES version, this step is mandatory before you can leave the bathroom.) OPEN the door on the right side in order to MOVE out into the hallway. In the hallway, you will notice that water is leaking out from under a door, which happens to lead to the ladies room. You are free to investigate it if you want, but you won't find anything too useful in there. Instead, OPEN the door off to the right. MOVE through the door to reach the main interior of the bar.
The bar is empty. On the counter is a glass with a beverage. You can TAKE it if you want to, but it isn't necessary. Excluding the hallway that you came from, there are three exits from this room. One off to the right is the front entrance to the bar, which is currently locked. A door to the left leads to the wine cellar, and a set of stairs lead to the second floor. For now, simply OPEN the door in the back to the wine cellar, but don't bother visiting just yet. To take the stairs, select MOVE and choose the square in the upper left corner of the Exits window.
The second floor[edit]
After climbing the stairs, you will arrive in a hallway. There are three pictures on the wall, all of boxers. The one on the far right, however, will bother you when you see it. It says the name of that boxer is Ace Harding. OPEN the door at the end of the hallway and MOVE through it to reach the receptionist's desk. If you examine the desk, you will notice a drawer. Use the OPEN on the desk to check the drawer and you will discover an envelope. OPEN the envelope, and inside you will find a bill. The bill will contain a list of medicines that were purchased, along with the address of the doctor who prescribed them. TAKE the bill. If you try to open the door on the left, you will discover that it's locked. At this point, USE first key you collected on the door, and it will unlock. In most cases, doing so will also open the door for you. MOVE through the door to the next room.
Upon entering the next room, you will find a dead body slumped over a desk in a pool of their own blood (sans the blood on the NES version). The corpse will be clutching a severed telephone receiver. The game tell you that you notice the he has a pocket. Use the OPEN command on the corpse to investigate the pocket, and inside you will find a second key. TAKE this key. The desk in this room, like the one in the previous room, has a drawer. Use the OPEN command on the desk, to check this drawer. Inside, you will find a pencil and a third key. TAKE both items. You may also notice a safe on the wall, but you don't know the combination. Make a mental note of the safe for now. At this point, you can retrace your steps to the bar, but you can investigate further if you try to OPEN the window, and MOVE through it to the fire escape outside.
Climb higher[edit]
From the fire escape, you have three options; return to the office, climb up, or climb down. If you climb down, you will arrive in an alley at the side of the bar, where you may potentially run into a mugger. Climb up instead, and you will arrive outside of another window. OPEN this window, and MOVE through it to arrive in a room with a very bizarre chair that has straps. You may also notice three medicine vials, and a waste basket. Only the middle of the trio of vials is not empty, and contains Medrezine. You can take it if you want, but it is poisonous to you and you actually have no use for it. However, if you OPEN the waste basket, you will notice a syringe (or capsules in the NES version.) This will come in handy, so TAKE it with you. All that's left for you to do in this room is examine the button on the wall.
The elevator[edit]
This button is an elevator button. Use the HIT command on it to summon the elevator, and the MOVE inside. The interior of the elevator has four buttons on it. The top button takes you to the room you were just in. The next button down takes you back to the office with the corpse, and is a one-way trip, as the elevator conceals itself behind the wall when you exit. Pressing the second button from the bottom takes you to, of all places, a casino. We'll come back to that in a moment. Hitting the very bottom button sends you down into the sewers. This is a one way trip; you cannot return to the elevator if you do this. If you visit the casino, there is no way out of the casino other than through the elevator. This can be fixed if you choose to visit the sewer first.
HIT the bottom button and enter the sewer. MOVE through the only exit in the form of a sewage pipe, and you will end up below a ladder. Take the ladder up, and you will find yourself in a room between two doors. Before you do anything, OPEN both doors. The regular door to the right leads to the wine cellar beneath Joe's Bar, while the round door on the left leads to the casino.
The casino[edit]
Visit the casino to familiarize yourself with it. It contains no useful clues of any kind, but it is particularly useful for one reason: it's a great place to get more coins, especially if you run out of them. The roulette table(s) in the foreground are just for show, but one of the slot machines in the back is fully functional. If you have no coins, you can examine them and you will usually find a stray coin. If you have a coin, you can USE it on the machine to try your luck on the working slot machine (the other one will simply eat your coin and do nothing.) On occasion, you can win a number of coins, usually between 10 and 20. This will come in handy when you need to pay the fare for a cab ride (although in the NES version, the drivers will let you ride for free if you run out of money.)
When you're done in the casino, return through the door in the back to the room which leads to the sewers, and continue on to the wine cellar. As long as you opened the door to the wine cellar, you can MOVE via the square at the bottom of the Exits window to climb back up to Joe's Bar. If you did not open it, the door will be locked, so you will have to return to the elevator through the casino, and take it back up to the second floor office, and make your way back to the bar from there. Once you're back in the bar, USE the third key you obtained on the front door of the bar to unlock it, and then MOVE through it to head outside.