Having been out for the best part of a month now, we think it's fair to say that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is going to be one of those games where we never stop discovering new things.
In our playthroughs so far, these discoveries have had us grinning cheek to cheek on a pretty consistent basis, but that hasn't stopped the smiles from being wiped from our faces as we stumble across some game-changing mechanic at the 100-hour mark.
The question of whether Tears of the Kingdom is "too open" of an open world (if there is such a thing) might be best left until we have a better idea of everything that this Hyrule has to offer, but the sheer range of possibilities and options does mean that there have been countless occasions where we stumbled across a new feature only to think "I really wish I knew about that earlier!"
For us, the list of these features is growing longer by the day. A quick whip around Nintendo Life Towers produced a compendium of sorry tales where we had gone through dozens (and in one case multiple hundreds) of hours before discovering something that seemingly everybody else found out in the early days. We're not talking about story elements here, rather fundamental gameplay elements we somehow bypassed in our opening hours and of which we went blissfully unaware for weeks.
And so, we thought we would share some of them with you today in the hopes of showing just how much we missed. Warning! We have tried to discuss the following discoveries in as spoiler-free a fashion as possible (they can all be found in the early game), but if you are still exploring Hyrule at your own pace, then maybe come back to this one once you have ticked everything off your list.