Heavy Rain, really? Are we all still pretending that game was a groundbreaking piece of art? It was a game based around story and characters, but completely sucked at both.
Let's bar that the plot was derivative, or that the voice acting was atrocious, or that the characters had less personality than grass, or that most of them, if not all, were white with short brown hair (even the women), in some kind of statement about David Cage's ideal world, or it's grating, trying-too-hard soundtrack, or that it's the exact same game as Indigo Prophecy minus the supernatural elements, or that those same gameplay mechanics weren't any revolutionary in that game, since it just took the adventure game and QTE portions of the Shenmue series...and did nothing new with them.
Bar all of that stuff that I just mentioned. Let's focus on three things:
1) The script: yes, I kind of covered this with how the plot was derivative and the characters sucking, but I wanted to point out that the script was written purposefully to jerk the player around. A good mystery story sets itself up in a way that people can put it together from earlier clues. A David Cage mystery has people act in a way that no person ever acts so that the mystery killer doesn't get revealed too early (see: the scene where the killer's mom whispers the name to one of the characters, even though they're the only two people in the room), or edits scenes to remove incriminating evidence (see: the antique shop scene, where the PI goes 'Gee, I wonder what happened to my buddy.'), not to mention the laughably bad 'let's see the characters' thoughts' monologues, which would have the characters lie to the audience in their own private thoughts (the reporter character and the PI being the striking examples), all to keep their dramatic twists under wraps. The good mystery engages the audience to try and figure out the mystery, the Cage mystery is him standing between the audience and the story and go "See, I'm better than you are, and I'm going to spend the next several hours proving it."
2) So, we have a female lead get sexaually assaulted twice in the same day, then arbitrarily try to hop in bed with the dad looking for his kid, not to mention her dramatic twist that makes her come across as manipulative. With the majority of the remaining women being either helpless or non-entities, the whole game has a very misogynist vibe to it that makes most first person-shooters look progressive by comparison (notice I said 'vibe' not 'theme,' I think Cage only used the woman lead the same way other games use women: to sell games to horny teenage boys).
3) The mechanics: Despite the claim that everything you do matters in the game, most of the button presses in the QTE scenes don't do anything (and the ones that do are telegraphed with a loooooong bit of slow-motion), while the rest of the game is a dull, plodding adventure game. There's not much to talk about here.
Overall, this is a pretty weak list (Fallout: New Vegas was my favorite, and even that I wouldn't call 'game of the year' because of all the horror stories about bugs).
EDIT: I didn't play Civ V, WOW, Starcraft II, or Super Mario Galaxy 2, so maybe those are all that and a bag of chips. The rest...eh, not so much.
... Spot the Blizzard fan boy 
