Had I known this game would be so buggy I would never have bought it. Missing audio, stuck video,... and now when I am to grab the lantern in the shop the screen goes black and all that remains is the voice over, the hand icon and that's it. The entire screen stays dark and I cannot get out of that position without reloading to a previous save. Had I known I would have stuck to watching the walkthrough on YouTube... I can't use my old cd's anymore.
Anyone any suggestion? Or is the rest of this game equally buggy?? Thanks!

I wasn't able to reproduce this until I saw this bug report. It looks like it's a scripting error in the game. (ScummVM already works around a couple of those, but this one wasn't known before.) When you first enter Jack's store, you see the lamp on the table and hear Jack rummaging around in the back.

If you wait patiently until he returns, everything should be ok when you return to pick up the lamp later.

If you are looking at the cigar box when Jack returns, an important variable is never set. When you return to the store, the game thinks it's time to play the cutscene of Jack examining the lamp (again). It moves you to a "dummy" location (probably where the black screen comes from) that's supposed to start the cutscene, but that script is flagged to only run once so nothing happens and you're stuck.

I have an idea for how I think the bug should be worked around, though if I do it that way any broken savegame will remain broken, which obviously isn't ideal. You should be able to work around the bug like this, if you do it right before you enter the dark room:

1. Press Ctrl+D to open the debug console.
2. (Optional) Type "statevalue 10803" and press Enter. You will probably see the reply "[10803] = 1".
3. Type "statevalue 10803 0" and press Enter.
4. Type "exit" and press Enter.

My workaround for the screen going black needed some adjustments to not break the CD version, but after that it was accepted while I was away on vacation. So it should be in the next stable version of ScummVM or (since I don't know when that will be released) the development version. Of course, I have no idea if or when GOG will update their version.

Note that it doesn't fix the bug once it has happened, but as long as you play the game from a point before meeting Jack (which is very near the beginning of it anyway), it should prevent the bug from happening again.

The next version of SCUMMVM (still in development) should have fixes for:

- The blank screen when in the lantern shop https://bugs.scummvm.org/ticket/10604

- The utilization of the cigarette leading to a soft-lock under specific circumstances https://bugs.scummvm.org/ticket/10565

Also the audio missing during the Dock scene where you loot a crate isn't a bug so much as a design decision by the developers https://bugs.scummvm.org/ticket/10567. This is because of the original game developers changing the audio on the DVD version but forgetting to update the subtitles. if GOG wanted to they could possibly replace the video file with a copy from the CD version to resolve this right now (the video quality will be lower, but it's a small price to pay considering the audio you're missing out on).

What video where you stuck on Fabienne_Payet?

I'm not aware of any change to ScummVM to address that, but - as you say - replacing the video file with the one from the CD version should work.

True, I didn't mean to list it among the fixes. It's just an explanation of why it happens and what you can do to resolve it.

For what it's worth, I just installed this game last week (June of 2020) and ran into this exact issue two years after this post (dark screen when in Jack's shop reaching for the lantern). Has the version of this game on GOG really not been updated with fixes after all this time?

I was able to proceed by entering the debug console as recommended above, so it wasn't a showstopper. I was just surprised that this bug is still a thing after two years.

It's 2021 I'm using Win 7 64 bit for this game. I return to get the lantern and I still get the black screen after restarting and using the debug fix twice. Is there anything else I can try? I really liked this game and it doesn't play on my 64 bit anymore.
Thanks!

I was able to fix it using the poster's savegame and the black screen fix script. I'm now in the Underground! Thanks to everyone.

The GoG version has ScummVM 2.0.0 from December 2017. You can download 2.2.0 from scummvm.org and extract/copy over the version in the Zork folder. If you verify / reinstall thru Galaxy, then it will be overwritten with the 2.0 GoG provided version again. Note: it will not fix the already broken save you have in the case of this bug. But future play thrus, or starting over, should work fine.

End of january 2021, the bug is still present. :-/

As mentioned above, the bug should be fixed in more recent versions of ScummVM. Maybe if enough people filed bug reports with GOG support they'd take notice and update? (My experience with GOG support has been pretty mixed, though.)