Witcher sense would be an overkill, same with annoying blinking from RE. There are two approaches I'd favor, one is some UI indicator that you can in fact use the object just as you described. The other is consistently making every object interactible (if it makes sense obviously) even if output is just a toast message with 'There's nothing inside'.
And writing is indeed great, people do have a soft spot for something written by a human rather than a room of writers, keep up the good work lad