3 things you didn't know your PS5 could do

When you got your PS5, I bet you didn't immediately go "brilliant! I can spend lots of time exploring the Settings menu!" I know I didn't, because I wanted to play games.

But the truth is that there are some very useful tweaks and features living in the PS5's settings, and they can help you play longer, get into games more quickly and even play games when you can't be in the same room as your console.

These are my three favourite things many of us didn't know our PS5s could do.

1. Help you play for longer

There are few things more frustrating than running out of controller battery when you've barely got into a game. If you're like me you probably learnt to do the two-controller boogie – get two controllers and have one on charge while you use the other one to play – but you can't do that if you're doing local co-op and it's easy to forget the charging bit. So the PS5's ability to make your DualSense last longer is worth experimenting with.

Go into your PS5's settings and scroll down to Accessories. Select Controllers and you can now adjust several settings to prolong battery life: you can dim the lights on the DualSense, and you can dial down the haptic feedback. You can turn it off completely, but I'd advise against it: the vibration and resistance is half the fun of using DualSense controllers.

2. Create custom Game Presets

This one's brilliant. If you go into settings again and this time look at Save Data > Game/App Settings you'll see an option for Game Presets. This enables you to save your go-to settings – your difficulty level, whether you want the sticks to be inverted, whether you prefer performance more or resolution mode, your audio and subtitles preferences – and apply them automatically to new games so you can straight into the action instead of faffing around in the options screen.

3. Play when you're in a different room

For all its wonders, the PS5 isn't exactly portable. But with Remote Play, you can access it from different rooms via PCs, mobile devices and PS4s. To enable it, go into settings and then into the System section. Under Remote Play, enable the feature.

The next stage is to install the PS Remote Play app on your device or PC. You'll need to connect to the same Wi-Fi network as your PS5; you can then link your device to your PS5.

The quality of streaming depends almost entirely on your network: if you've got a really old router it's not going to be brilliant, so you might want to consider getting one of the best wireless routers if this is a feature you think you'll use a lot. But on a good connection at 1080p resolution it's really impressive on a tablet, and you can pair a DualSense controller to your device for that inimitable PS5 experience.