GB Feature: Numen: Contest of Heroes Review
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The mechanics of the game are also a little bit strange. Each class gets a handful of skills they can learn, and your god can also teach you some skills, but sort of annoyingly skills have a double cost, both in energy and stamina. Energy is basically the same as what you see in other games (where it's sometimes called mana), but the idea behind stamina is unique to Numen. Your stamina total determines how quickly you regenerate health, and if you run out of stamina, then you stop regenerating altogether. The annoying part is that the only way to replenish your stamina is to rest at a campfire, but you only find one or two campfires per map, and every time you rest, enemies respawn. So the only way to really make progress in the game is to avoid your skills as much as possible, which makes the frequent battles sort of tedious, since you mostly just click on an enemy once to initiate the battle and then twiddle your thumbs for a while until it's over. I've never played an action RPG before where the developer tried so hard to make the game less fun to play.
There are also some other oddities. There's a dice game you can play to gamble for items, but for some reason two of the six symbols come up way more often than the others, making the game pretty easy to win. Nothing in the equipment icons shows whether you can use the items or not, or what their quality is, and so you have to hover the mouse over each item to figure these things out. Combat is sort of clumsy, and half of the skills cause your character to stop fighting. Inventory space is limited, but it's easy to get stuck with quest items that you're not allowed to throw away. Your quest journal rarely tells you even the basics of the quests, so it's easy to get lost. And there's a thoroughly lame sequence involving a labyrinth at the end of the game, where you first have to blunder through it to find a minotaur, and then after defeating the minotaur you have to blunder back out. The labyrinth sequence was my least favorite hour playing an RPG in a long time.
