95% positive reviews. Four people playing.

Duriano, a top-down arena roguelite from Thai indie studio Adisoft Gaming Co.,Ltd., launched on Steam May 11 to a respectable Very Positive rating — 69 out of 73 reviews favorable. It sits on Steam’s New Releases chart. Its most dedicated player has logged 163.6 hours. And right now, you could fit its entire concurrent player base in a sedan.

The pitch is admirably strange: you play as a durian — the fruit — cast as a Norse warrior chosen by Hela to battle through the Nine Realms and slay the gods of Asgard. Seven character types, roguelite progression, permanent stat upgrades, and a mobile version on Google Play. The bones are there.

The reviews tell a more complicated story. The top negative review, from a player with 6.4 hours, flags real structural problems: no leaderboard, poor class balance, and an endless mode so tedious that dying feels like relief. “I have to kill my character out of boredom,” they wrote. “It has potential otherwise, but I don’t recommend for now.”

The positive reviews are genuine — one Thai-language reviewer calls the characters cute and the difficulty well-tuned — but most come from a small, committed core, many writing before the full launch. Adisoft’s own blog positions Duriano as proof that Thailand’s indie scene is “no longer just up-and-coming — it’s here.”

None of that changes the math. Steam dumps thousands of new releases each year. A 95% rating from 73 people doesn’t algorithmically compete with 80% from 80,000. The $14.99 price puts Duriano in a crowded roguelite field against established titles with years of patches and built-in communities.

Duriano didn’t launch broken. It didn’t get review-bombed. It just arrived, quietly, into a marketplace that doesn’t reward quiet. The players who found it seem happy. The problem is everyone who didn’t.

Sources