@icedquinn @zemichi @riserise i think the problem is that it IS overt. people don't notice the rugs. people do notice the bright, neon yellow paint in a game that is otherwise very dull in its color palette. you can do other things to guide the player's view to a certain point, like a ladder they can climb, and make it way more subconscious.
the other problem is that this is a tactic that is now used way too often. covering things that can be climbed or interacted with in paint is a strategy that has been used for over a decade now and it's old.
players never had issues finding where they needed to go in older games, which is probably mostly attributed to the fact that devs/publishers are trying to market their games to much wider audiences now to make up for their bloated budgets. they scrape the bottom of the barrel for the most normie of players possible so that they know anybody who was even moderately interested could feasibly play their game. that's part of the reason for all of the sanitization and censorship as well.
it's already pretty obvious without the paint that you can climb up this ladder. they have a clear line to it, it's in front of the fence and wall geometry, and there's an enemy there which acts as another point of interest. if they wanted to make it even more obvious without doing something extremely generic, they could put another point of interest there from a gameplay standpoint, something like an herb or an ammo pickup. they could also do something like make the ladder out of a different material to make it stand out more, or tie some tattered clothing to it that blows around in the wind to catch the player's eye. they could even have the enemy climb down the ladder, to signify to the player that it is something they might be able to climb up. all of these things could be combined and it would be less egregious than neon paint.
hell, they could just video gamify it and put a blinking red arrow next to it and it would still look better than this. obviously not the style they're going for, but i don't really think the paint is either.