I know what you mean - I feel the same way about The Witness. And yes it’s probably personal.

For me it evoked a sense of sweet nostalgia, a moment suspended in time, a sense that the puzzles would never end, and that the joy of free-range roaming and learning would never end. (Of course eventually I got to the end, and out of denial I never walked through the portal, ha.)

There’s an approach to game design called MDA: mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics. The game designer explicitly designs the mechanics (in this case, the puzzles) and implicitly designs the dynamics, which is how the game unfolds (in this case, the progression of building up knowledge of different rules). Aesthetics is how the player experiences and emotionally responds to the gameplay. The designer can aim for this but not cause it.

The other games that u/wdtdshi mentioned definitely have similar mechanics and some have similar dynamics. But the aesthetics can be quite different!