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the idea (and this worked) was that if the player made a noise and a guard heard it and then investigated and didn't find the player but did find another guard they would assume the guard made that noise and not be alert anymore because "oh it was just bob". "cool" but basically never ever legible

another one was, i made the rain in Weird West, which wets things and fills containers and puts fires out and whatever. for a long time i had the rain coming in at the correct angle based on the wind, so in a storm you could shelter behind a building and get less wet. "cool". not legible, not useful

the player only ever assumes the place you'd stand to get wet is "outside"; the cool behaviour only ever reads as a bug, "was outside, didn't get wet". or "got wet inside" because you were near a window. i changed it to a straight-down line trace

That kind of stuff is effective when it's exposed to the player through either just stating the sub-text or thought (audio/text barks) or visual storytelling (body language, expressions).

stealth games seem like a big pitfall specifically for this sort of thing, I like how the Hitman games "solve" this behavior by having NPCs always speak all their thoughts out loud (with hundreds of lines for different variations), so the player always has an idea of what behavior was just triggered