My old apartment had a facet that always leaked unless the handle was all the way to the left. My mom's car requires you to jiggle the handle to get it open. My girlfriend's computer only charges if you press upwards on the connection. Every day we enact the little procedures necessary to get the things around us to work.
Ideally a game gets harder as you progress so it remains fun even with your higher skill level. Just doubling the numbers doesn't do it, we need to create situations that require deeper tactics to overcome
One way first person shooters achieve this is by starting you off with a weak weapon that requires nothing fancy; you just point and shoot. Later weapons have limited ammo, slow bullets, cooldowns, short range, ect. This allows for tactical complexity because the player has to adopt new behaviors to deal with these limitations. But to achieve this they introduce a steady power creep to get the player to move on from the old weapons to the new.
However we can get all the effect of increased complexity without requiring the player to switch weapons if we make items start off easy to use, but accumulate glitches over time.
Imagine the player thinking: "If I circle to the south I can use my wand of lightening that is stuck on north, but if I dash to that pool of water I can use the wand of fireball that always singes me. My teleport talisman only work every other try, so if I get in trouble, I need to remember to bail out earlier than usual"
The overall effect will be to gradually build up a more and more complicated system of tricks and usage details until each play-through has a unique set of weapons. The limits of the player ability would be tested as they try and eke a little more use out of each barely functional item. And we would not have to have levels or power curves to have increasing challenge.
