Think of it as an open world adventure. You know you need to find parts to build a machine and that they are gathered all over the world. You also find out that the crystals have secondary functions that will aid you on your journey. Forget about handholding in this game. Just explore the world.
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Anyway, go to Katmandu.
Why that place and not another one? Does the game suggest me in any way to go there and not to somewhere else?
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No, bascially you decide the order you do stuff in. But you will find out that sometimes you just can´t do some stuff because you need something from somewhere else. At the moment it´s advisable to go to Katmandu to get a few thigns and understand the story better. But you might as well go to Mexico City, or even Kinshasa. If you can´t progres at any certain point it probably means you´re missing something. But in general you´re on your own now.
I´d be really curious to know what place you´re thinking of, and what those three unreleated things are.
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ViagraHead pointed to an ankh in the dream
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There is a news about the defacement of the Sphinx in the newspaper
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There is a painting of pyramids in Annie’s office
So I thought to go to Egypt.
In my opinion there is also a good chance that you would be a bit traumatized at seeing the conclusion I came after drawing on paper some pictorial correlations.
I can’t sleep tonight (damn fall insomnia, it’s 4:30 AM) so I came here, found your recent posts and started laughing 
Thanks LowLevel!
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ViagraHead pointed to an ankh in the dream
I never addressed him this way, you will find that he is really tough, or “cazzuto” as we are used to say, so your description is perfect.
About the other things you asked: you have many clues, but they are not linked subsequentially, one after one. You can go in every place, and solve puzzles in any order.
@milanfahrnholz suggested you to go to Katmandu because he already knows why. Your clues?
I don’t know if you got them already, but they are in San Francisco and in Kinshasha.
The Sphinx is important, you think? Then go to Cairo.
This adventure is open, you know your goals:
- your main goal is to build that device
- you have a yellow crystal shard, you must find the other shard
Besides Zak and Annie, you have two other characters. You can play with them, too.
Please post a picture! I’m curious!
Ahahahahahah!!!
Your imagination is awesome!
I can assure you, every clue is in the game!
If the candelabra has 3 arms, they will remain 3 
Every time I play an adventure game focused on an archaeological research, the first thing that comes to my mind is Indiana Jones.
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This game is about exploration. By doing that, you’ll find the hints you need. Concentrating on getting some money early on really helps on that. Every place is important. If you can’t do anything at a certain place right now, it will certainly become important later on.
Ahhh, how this chart brings back memories.
Did you give up when all kids (or 1) ended up in the dungeon in MM?
Getting captured in Zak didn’t pop up a “game over” screen. Remember it is not like a Sierra game that hits you over the head just for entering a room or picking up or using an object. It may not be as perfected as in later Lucasarts games and there are a few dead ends or possible ways to die (which isn’t a bad thing, but adds to the tension, IMO), but still Zak is a whole lot more fair to exploring than said Sierra-type games.
Bottomline: yes, you should get captured at least once. It fills in the story. Yes, you can avoid getting captured and complete the game (although that pbly means you were just using a walkthrough), but then you might complain about missing (optional) parts of the game. Just enjoy and don’t overanalyse while playing. OK, so what if Zak doesn’t have the right motivation as an actor at every step he takes, still you as a player controlling him does. It’s a game, not a book or a movie. Main motivation is to discover new rooms and finding new puzzels/solutions. And hoping for a nice ending (remember most games back then just showed: “congratulations, you’ve completed the game!” In the best case there might be a full screen art shown.
WTF?!?!
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He said he never played MM and doesn´t intend to. Which is a bit of a shame since I belive that the openess of MM kinda conditions you for Zak.
Agreed, Zak has one of the most satisfying endings ever.
It’s too early for me to build an opinion about the game, but I can tell you why for me it’s very important to analyze this game just a bit at the beginning, to understand what kind of adventure game it is.
I’m familiar with adventure games that have a story, not just a plot and a puzzle dependency chart. Story is an important element for me, so when a game puts the player in an “open world” context and gives him the opportunity to write his own story/journey between the few fixed moments of the plot, I loose a bit of interest, because I was hoping for a specific story written by the authors, not by me.
Story is also useful to provide goals. In “Indiana Jones and the Fate Of Atlantis” you can talk to people and people can give you the reason to go in some specific place. In Zak you can’t talk to anyone, you explore randomly the cities and you have to be lucky that the random place that you decided to go has some useful objects or characters. That’s OK, but I had to know if this is an actual investigation or not. It isn’t.
That doesn’t mean that I can’t play this kind of adventure games or that I will not enjoy them, it just means that to decide how to manage an adventure game I have to understand if they are more similar to the “old school” games that I remember or not. It seems to me that “Zak” is such a game and now that I’ve understood this I can keep playing without bothering about some game elements that I will not find in it.
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Remember how old this game is and that it was before dialog puzzles and dependency charts.
You will still find some interesting things out later. But there is no story to guide you or anything. There is even less of that in Maniac Mansion. They´re just simple. Maniac Mansion is rescue girl and Zak McKracken is save world. And then you will have to find the means to do that.
That´s all there is to it really.
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Although in Zak there is more dialogue than in MM (just no dialogue trees or dialogue puzzles).
Fear not, @LowLevel, there is a story in Zak, it just needs some time to unroll. Not unlike in The Dig.
MM: save the girl
Zak: save the world
MI: save your selfesteem
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