Since most gaming news sites have pretty much given up and said, "Fuck it, lets just give it to the game with the biggest marketing budget", I think we should have some different perspectives.
GAME OF THE YEAR: Rogue Legacy - There's a lot to love about Rogue Legacy. The charming art style, the iterative gameplay, the difficulty that rides the line between Too Easy and Too Hard(at least until about NG+4 or so), the way the story, such as it is, ties neatly into the core mechanic of generational succession without rubbing it in your face and going OH LOOK AT THIS AREN'T WE CLEVER?
There's also a lot to hate. It's kind of repetitive, the classes are ridiculously unbalanced, the procedurally generated castle shows its hand a bit too often, and there are all of maybe a dozen palette-swapped enemies. Still, there's a reason I sank so many hours into this game, and it's not just because I was unemployed for four months right after I bought it. It's a lot of fun, a clever twist on the roguelike genre, and it's a game that isn't ashamed to be a game.
RUNNER UP: Cookie Clicker - While some might argue that Cookie Clicker doesn't really qualify as a "game", I would just like to say that if I have to sit through one more goddamn pedantic argument about what a game is and isn't I am going to shove my face into a lawnmower so I can never, ever, use the internet again. Cookie Clicker is a game because the guy who made it says it is. End of story.
Cookie Clicker started out as a relatively simple Candy Box clone, but over the course of the year, and many, many updates, it's morphed into something all its own. While the core gameplay is still quite simple - click things to make more things - the world that's been built around that gameplay has a sort of whimsical horror to it that makes it unique.
Plus, it's free, and the Christmas update lets you murder reindeer and clone a Santa Claus from a test tube with a little hat on it to help you make more cookies.
So let's hear it! What is/are your game(s) of the year, and why? They don't even have to be games that came out in 2013; if you just discovered a weird old Genesis-era JRPG this year, and loved that more than anything else, that's great! I wanna hear about that. Or if you really enjoyed one of the AAA megabudget games that came out this year, that's cool too! I only ask that we try to refrain from arguments in this thread. This is a place to celebrate games, not trash them.