You guys ever play the Penumbra series, or Call of Cthulhu? Being at a certain distance away from any object you were directly looking at, and pressing the action key, would render a voice over to play describing it. This is a staple of adventure games in the old days.

Is there any way to emulate this in coding, or flowgraph, in Cryengine3?

yes probably via soundspot and flowgraph

Can be done with flowgraph using "RayCastCamera"-node to detect entities, or making all applicable entities usable.

that only displays a text message, plus the debug gun does that, assuming you can use fmod (I can't don't ask me), you could probably play a sound using it

Yea, fg above shows a sample about how to retrieve entity infromation, and debug-node is used for displaying it. Of course node needs to be replaced with some other node for creating sound or speech.

yep