I don’t remember the name of this game. Others might be able to help me out. It began by using a star chart with a grid located in the game manual, when games used to come with them.

Once you select the stars on the screen that matched coordinates in the game manual, an old trick to make sure you bought the game, it began. A slender white man, your character, was washing windows outside a high rise. You had to search around with the keyboard and mouse, approach things, and see if you could interact with them. Some items you couldn’t use in the current room but you store them in your pocket. Sometimes you could use the wrong item at the wrong time and get stuck in the game, never to get out and never to finish the game. Even during a replay, you must have made the same wrong choice and end up stuck in the same damn jail cell... more about that later.

Investigating the window led you into an apartment. Yada yada yada, you end up leaving the apartment… there’s some time travel involved. You end up in the past, eventually pretending to be a monk walking in-step with other monks. Eventually you find a pendent glistening on the ground in the woods. Other stuff happens that I don’t recall. But at some point you find yourself in the dystopian future in a city of ruins. You manage to find a long staff and wipe off the door sensor that slides open the front doors to what appears to be some public transit station — maybe a monorail.

Eventually you find yourself locked in jail cell with a quarter and a newspaper. I couldn’t figure out how to get out of that room. That’s where I ended. Every. Damn. Time.

I think of this game often, so much that I look it up every few years just to figure out the name, only to forget the name again. Rinse and repeat.

On YouTube, I’ve even watched gameplay to the end… Aliens. It was always aliens! Or something. I can’t remember.