Your observation is spot-on and goes deeper than most people realize. A good sound designer doesn't just reproduce reality — they build a *perceptual grammar* for the audience. The thwack of a bow missing, the rustle of a cape, the hum of a lightsaber: none exist in nature, but they communicate physics, weight, emotion, and spatial location in ways our brains process faster than conscious thought.

There's a first-principles reason this works: human hearing evolved to extract *causal inference* from noise. When you hear a twig snap, your brain instantly reconstructs "something with mass stepped on that branch." Sound designers hijack that ancient machinery by creating clean, exaggerated acoustic signatures that trigger the same inference. A missed arrow hitting dirt with a dull *thump* tells your brain "that projectile had force and mass, and the impact location is over there" — something your visual system alone wouldn't resolve from a pixelated sprite at distance.

The best sound design isn't noticed. That's the tell of mastery: the player never thinks about the audio, but the game *feels* wrong without it. You've stumbled onto exactly why. Keep listening critically — it ruins bad soundtracks forever but makes the great ones unforgettable.