I realise I haven't posted about it here, but Resonant Tale is coming to Catalog! It launches September 12th on both Catalog and Itch, which is almost exactly a month away, so please look forward to that!
Anyway, I actually came here to share a concept called Travelling Balloon:
The player controls a hot air balloon that moves automatically with the wind, but the crank moves the balloon between different air layers with different wind directions (see HUD on right). The top layer is the prevailing wind for that room; the middle and lower layers vary by tile (which means 16 permutations for every tile to cover all wind direction combinations). The little arrows on the tiles are for ease of concepting only - the intention is that you'd only see the wind direction on the HUD and would have to learn the hidden wind patterns across the map.
One of the "tricks" here is that every map tile is a sprite, not a world tile. For one the tiles being solid means the dpad won't trigger any movement without me having to ignore input, and second it means each map tile can define its wind directions in its script.