If you're keen to this then you will find it surprising how few games work this way.
Games are part art, what's more to understand?
There's some fun image out there I can't exactly recall, but it's basically of an interview with some game devs, and one of them saying something like "We wanted to have a pot with flowers on the table here, and when you come back to this room later, the color of the flowers changes. No gameplay consequences. But we cut it for time. Why did we want it? Because we thought it'd be cool."
But in a lot of games there's tons of stuff like that which doesn't get cut. Gamedev is full of those "because it'd be cool" or other vague artistic reasons (as opposed to business reasons or researched game testing reasons) for something to be there, or something to be polished well beyond reason.
At first glance The Witness is a puzzle game, made annoying by the fact that you have to walk everywhere instead of clicking "Next Puzzle". But then you occasionally see things in the environment that are just really pleasing. An example that springs to mind is a bunch of broken metal in a window[0], and some branches on a tree, that line up with the sun (which doesn't move) to cast a shadow of a woman sitting underneath a tree[1].
And there's loads of this stuff. And noticing it doesn't contribute anything at all to the apparent objective of the game (except where it does!), but it adds so much that you just wouldn't get if it were the simple puzzle game that it initially appears to be.
I really like this game.
[0] https://img.incoherency.co.uk/3706
[1] https://img.incoherency.co.uk/3705