That sort of double-duty was pretty common in old console games, which were limited in both memory and available compute time, so that's a pretty plausible theo

That sort of double-duty was pretty common in old console games, which were limited in both memory and available compute time, so that's a pretty plausible theory. But seeing as one of the game's creators has mentioned they liked to put in contextual cues for when things were about to happen, it also seems pretty plausible that it's intentional.