I don’t think Zak has an absence of “look” per se. It felt like a half-way point between the “read” of MM and the “look” of MI/Indy4/whatever.
The main problem with a lack of a talk verb is that you can’t easily get a repeat of what you need to do if you drop the game for a week or two. But this isn’t a problem with the lack of the talk verb per se. Various characters (like the shaman) spontaneously say things, just not necessarily all the pertinent things.
In the talk implementation you’d have, e.g.:
- ask about the crystal
- ask about the dance
But he might just as well have blurted out two short sentences instead of one. Don’t come back until… and btw I’ll take $1000.
I didn’t really miss talk, perhaps because I played the game in 2018 with an annoyingly small but nevertheless not unreasonable number of 99 save slots. It could’ve been fun to have a dialog puzzle with the King, I suppose. But one doesn’t need a talk verb to do dialog puzzles!