First, this game has nothing to do with Zork. I don't know the history of it, but I imagine they designed a Myst knockoff first without thinking about Zork, and then decided later to shoehorn in some references to associate with an established name before releasing it. Sure, there are some references here and there to established elements in the Zork world, but they're not integral to the game, and the tone, in particular, is all wrong. I've played all the Zork games, and grim, gory, horror isn't Zork. Second, even if you just accept it's not really a Zork game and take it on its own merits, it's a terrible adventure game. The puzzles are completely ridiculous. Many of them involve collecting a series of obscure clues spread out all over the place to piece together codes to open this or that. Some of these if you somehow figure out where to find all the clues to the code will give you like five different variants, with nothing to tell you which is right, or will give you the numbers to a code but not the order of the numbers. There are also a number of music based puzzles, which is a mortal sin of game design in my book. Plus, you can die randomly quite easily by clicking on something random, and there are several timed events that kill you. Also, some maddening pixel hunting for objects buried in the blurry, dark graphics. Pretty much everything awful you could put into an adventure game, this game has got.
This game implements some kind of extreme mouse smoothing/acceleration such that if you move the mouse at a normal speed a short distance like in a typical mouse look, nothing happens. The aiming cursor barely budges. You have to quickly move your mouse several inches to get any reaction. That broke the game immediately for me.
Maybe if the camera worked there's a good game underneath here somewhere? I seriously doubt it, but I'll never know because I can't even get through the tutorial. The slightest movement of the mouse keeps causing the camera to spin out of control. Nothing I do with the mouse corresponds in the slightest to any reasonable reaction on the screen. Mouselook is just completely broken.
I didn't ever play this when it first came out in 1988. I recognize having lived through it that our standards were a lot lower back then, and we were willing to put up with things in games we'd never tolerate now. So I guess it's possible Wasteland 1 wasn't always so bad in the context of the times. All I can say that as a first time player in 2019, it is absolutely terrible. Incomprehensible UI, no story of any significance, no meaningful characters or character development, simplistic and boring combat, extremely annoying movement and interaction. Just a total mess not worth anyone's time.
It's ridiculous that GOG continues to sell this product that they know is broken. Their version of Sanitarium crashes every 5 or 10 minutes. It's been that way since they first released it. It's still that way. Yet they still sell it.
