Yes, it's Babby's First Level Design Cue, hinting to the player that they should play silly buggers on a precarious-looking atack of crates to investigate that ceiling tile.
I put, like, four keyframes of motion into a bespoke "lifting up and sliding that one sus ceiling tile" mover for the sake of going "lol there's, like, a lockpick in the suspended ceiling, well done"
Kinda bitterly funny that I spent maybe half an hour googling for a permissively-licensed handprint picture I could ultimate turn into a blurry 32-pixel-square smudge overlaid on a copy of a stock DX texture, and did something not a million miles away from the whole "HUR FNUR THE DEVS HAVE COVERED EVERYTHING INTERACTABLE WITH YELLOW PAINT AND I'M MAD ABOUT IT" discourse that ate Twitter for a week, which is to say, I put in an affordance to quietly guide player interaction.
And I can get away with being subtle about it — to the extent that's subtle, lol — because I'm working in a two-decade-old game engine which simply cannot accommodate the clutter of contemporary AAA game art. Deux Ex cannot even attempt Beige Photorealism, therefore there is seldom any necessity, when working in it, to bother disambiguating "this is something you can futz with" from "this is scenery"; because more often than not, the "scenery" amounts to a low-resolution photo slapped on a flat surface to distract you from the fact most of the geometry is at least a scale foot thick and Extremely Square.
The grubby truth is that interaction design has barely got richer than Deus Ex's, and the "better" graphics get, the harder devs have to work at conveying to you which are the handful of things you can poke with in the same handful of ways, because you can't tell by just looking at them any more; but they have try not to look like they're trying because it hurts the verisimitude, and the illusion is just more and more fragile. The more real-looking two cardboard boxes in front of you are, the more absurd it seems that one can be opened and the other is an immovable, indestructible lump.
Photorealism is a fucking pox on devs and players both.