I had similar thoughts yesterday. In a way, God of War reminds me of an old school JRPG. Places like the Witch's house area have a very striking look for a location we'll spend as little time in as we do. It really helps to make this feel like an epic adventure, and it's something we'd see in SNES RPGs all the time, but have since then almost abandoned the genre entirely due to how much more expensive and time consuming it is to make this kind of thing these days. That same area in a pixel art 2D game would be much easier to make than creating all of these incredibly high quality assets and animations, so full of detail, just to use in a tiny part of the game.
So much love, time and of course money went into creating this world we're exploring, and they want us to enjoy every part of it. They made it full of incredibly well crafted locations for you to discover. The journey is itself a reward, due to how well the game controls and how good the combat is, but they don't use that as en excuse to not give you amazing things to find.
I was expecting this to be a much more "cinematic and story driven" game than it is, and I was totally ready for it, I don't even mean this in a negative way, but it just completely took me by surprise with how much of my time with the game and also my enjoyment come out of pure gameplay. If I have to sit down and tell you the story so far in my more than 27 hours with the game, I won't really have that much to tell without getting into the lore and side stories like the Dwarf King. If I were to tell you about the places I've found and things I've fought, however, you better take a seat.
