Not Rogue Legacy or Papers, please. You sure like your interactive stories
Papers Please comes really close. I would say 4th to 3rd place. I guess I just like Gone Home because I came into it not knowing a single thing about it. All I knew was the synopsis. It was evocative, beautiful, and exploration-wise it was the free-est you could be. I mean, the red herrings didn't feel like red herrings they were just setpieces left in there for you to play with. Yes, when you analyze it it just feels like a longer, more fleshed out version of Dear Esther but that was like way later after playing it.
Rogue Legacy was good. I would say somewhere between 12th to 10th place. It's a roguelike with deep implications on the premise and I have a soft spot for roguelikes but that was it.
Btw, my 2nd-placer is Antichamber.
I wouldn't say Papers Please was the indie game of the year. It did something new and was interesting, but it didn't feel as ambitious and complete as Rogue Legacy or The Stanley Parable.
The thing about The Stanley Parable is, I actually thought it was
worse than the original mod. I think the original mod set out to do what it had always meant to do and then people wanted more and it started hyping and hyping and making more endings and easter eggs. I just think it oversold. Don't get me wrong, the Parable was amazing. I especially loved the museum and the "demo".
I liked the dichotomy between playing the script and running loose in your own story. But when I played this thing in its entirety I thought it was going to expand on these implications and philosophies, not turn the omniscient narrator into a male Glados and your struggles into some zany "You vs The Narrative" plot. I guess you just had to be there when the mod first came out and think that there was nothing else like it in its time. The new Stanley Parable just felt like a fleshed out clone of its original intention.
In other words, The (new) Stanley Parable could've been another Gone Home. But no, it chose to be a game about being in a game. The fact that I knew this sort of made me see it as nothing more than a game with paths.
I would say it ranks 8th in my top for 2013.