I've been seeing a lot of confusion in the notes about exactly how this proposed gimmick is meant to operate, so let's break it down. Broadly speaking, there are three principle mechanisms of access gating in non-linear platformers:
Ability gating: Permanently altering the player character's capabilities in a way which allows them to overcome previously impassable obstacles; for example, a high-jump upgrade that lets you reach new platforms.
Lock-and-key gating: Permanently altering the environment in a way which removes previously impassable obstacles; for example, a keycard which causes certain locked doors to open when you approach them.
Knowledge gating: Revealing ways of acting or interacting which the player character already possesses, but which were deliberately obscured from the player, typically due to requiring unintuitive sequences of inputs and/or only being possible in very specific situations which are unlikely to arise by chance.
Most of the "this is just [insert game]" responses are simply name-checking other titles which employ knowledge gating, which isn't what's being proposed here.
Rather, we're talking about breaking a very specific implicit rule which almost all non-linear platformers observe: knowledge-gated movement tech is either available right from the start of the game, or else tied to ability-gating in such a way that it's obvious in retrospect which upgrade is granting the tech in question.
Critically, knowledge-gated movement tech is almost never tied to lock-and-key upgrades. This is a rule you probably haven't worked out explicitly if you're not a game design nerd, but you'd be hard-pressed to find counterexamples in mainstream titles, and for pretty obvious reasons: it's hard to secretly give the player new abilities without changing how they interact with the environment.
(This is why, for example, something like Tunic doesn't qualify. The hidden manual pages inform the player of knowledge-gated movement tech, but don't actually grant it – you can still do all that stuff without finding the pages that tell you about it.)
The central joke at the player's expense, then, is that we're proposing a non-linear platformer which pretends to exclusively employ lock-and-key gating, when in fact the pickups which appear simply to passively unlock paths are also modifying how the player character is able to interact with the environment in non-obvious and undisclosed ways.
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