There are so many unique feelings, experiences and emotions you can tie to playing through a game you enjoy and felt gripped by. It's a similar tie-in to feelings of nostalgia, but for me there is no greater compliment about a game than to play it for like 50 hours (or even just 3 hours) then be like "oh man I gotta listen to this OST a whole lot more" then proceed to actually listen to it on the reg for years to come.
It's a mixture of enjoying the music at face value, but I wonder if it activates similar areas of the brain that go off from playing a great game for the first time, elicting similar feelings. Not only raw emotion, but the process the mind goes through while deciphering a game's ludology, game feel and mechanical scope. For me it actually makes revisiting the soundtracks even more affecting than replaying the game itself when you already have that knowledge and aren't able to go through that learning process again, as much fun as a fast replay can be.
As someone who's played games for a few decades now I'm so grateful to still be able to feel that sense of discovery, and wonder, and to get absolutely enraptured by great compositions and the atmosphere and sense of place those games have.
