In a classic roguelike like NetHack when you first encounter a magic potion or wand, for example, you don’t initially know what it is. Players have three different ways to figure out what an item does.

  1. Read a scroll of identify to figure out what the item is. This is the most reliable way to find out what an item is, but the scrolls are a limited resource.
  2. Just try the item out blindly and see what happens through observation. This is risky though because you don’t know if the item is beneficial or not. You might try on what appears to be better armor only to discover it is a cursed -3 ring mail, and because it is cursed you can’t remove it without holy water (a limited resource) or prayer (which potentially risks angering your god).
  3. You can also more safely try and get some hints about the item without direct use of it. If you know how much a certain item costs, you can figure it out if you run into it in a shop even if it is unidentified. You can write something on the floor with wands and observe the effects. Rings can be dropped into sinks and also have observable effects (but then you lose the ring in the process, and also you need to know what you’re trying to observe). Your pets don’t walk over cursed items.

Having to figure out what something does can be a fun problem solving activity, and there are interesting choices being made here. Reliably determine something with a limited resource, reliably determine something in a risky manner, or unreliably try to determine something in a safe manner.

There are other ways you can play around with unknown objects as well. In Michael Brough’s Cinco Paus you have five wands that each have five effects, but using the wand doesn’t necessarily reveal all the effects. Certain effects will only trigger on certain conditions. So the game involves trying to figure out what abilities you have as quickly as possible, while also trying to manage enemy hazards in a tight 5x5 grid while collecting treasure/resources.

Items that have more than one use are always going to be more interesting than items that have a single use. Potions, drugs, etc. might have effects where you roll a 2d6 with things in the 5-9 band being the usual effects, and on the ends of the curve you start to see some of the stranger properties emerge. For other kinds of objects you can creates layers of discoverability where some uses are obvious to determine, and some take more time to notice.