I just learned that you can throw a Lloyd's Talisman at a mimic chest to 'deactivate' it.
WAT
welcome to the world of dark souls, where 90% of those little tricks aren't hinted to the player.
Seriously though, there's a neat little story about items in this game. One of the starting gifts in DS1 is an item that has a description that's like "perhaps this item will be useful in the future". The internet turned the game upside down looking for a possible use for this item, trying it in every sort of way that was possible... only to have Miyazaki admitting it was just a little bit of trolling. Combine that with the minimal info that's given to the player in FROM games, and you have people spending thousands of hours trying to figure stuff out, trying to find every secret, every item, every use of said items, every possible upgrade... on top of this meaningless blurb that's given to you and that even as a new player you kinda feel drawn to it because of the hints that little description gives.
Oh yeah...
Hey Miyazaki-san, what's this item for?
Oh, that thing? Nah, I was just trolling. It's useless.
Yeah.