Fortune's Run - or, How One of the Most Interesting Indie Games Is Coming to an End
2026-09-06
Some games reach the end of their life because they simply turn out to be bad. Some never find an audience, fall into development hell, or get cancelled before anyone even has a chance to get attached to them.
And then there is Fortune's Run.
A game full of ideas, personality, an incredibly distinctive world, and moments that made it feel like its developers had completely forgotten the word "compromise" even existed.
And now, everything points to us never seeing it finished.
I think that's exactly why this makes me so damn sad.
What exactly is Fortune's Run?
If you've never played Fortune's Run, describing it with a single genre is almost impossible.
It's an FPS. An immersive sim. A bit of a boomer shooter. A bit of an RPG. A bit of a stealth game. You can feel the DNA of Deus Ex, Thief, E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy, old-school shooters, and action games, except the whole thing moves at the pace of someone who drank three energy drinks and just discovered strafe jumping.
Game journalists once described Fortune's Run as something like "the Jedi Knight 4 we never got", and later compared it to an immersive sim running at 1.5x speed.
And honestly, that feels pretty accurate.
Melee combat has combos, counters, parries, and throws. You can sneak around, experiment with the environment, turn the game's systems against your enemies, or just burst into a room and create absolute chaos.
Then there is the distinctive science-fiction aesthetic, industrial locations, pixel-art elements, the dystopian world of New Zabra, and Mozah, the game's protagonist.
This wasn't another safe indie game trying to recreate something we already know.
Fortune's Run was weird.
And I mean that as a huge compliment.
Even its current Steam description still promotes a combat system inspired by fighting games and character action games, a tactical approach to encounters, exploration of an industrial world, and a structure inspired by classic immersive sims.
Two people and a game that was definitely too big
Fortune's Run was developed by the small Team Fortune, with Dizzie and Arachne forming the core of the project for most of its development.
Even the older development posts show how absurdly ambitious the whole thing was.
The developers rebuilt the AI, physics system, collisions, stealth mechanics, weapons, environmental interactions, and entire sections of levels. They added systems for carrying bodies, security cameras, dynamic alarms, electronics repair minigames, new factions, elemental weapons, and more and more mechanics.
All of this from a team with enormous ambitions and far too few people.
In October 2023, the developers admitted that sales were barely enough for the two of them to live on less than a single minimum wage. Instead of taking a break after the launch crunch, the plan was to work even more and cut additional content just to have a chance of finishing the project at all.
Looking back at it now, it's hard not to see the first major warning sign.
From the very beginning, Fortune's Run was operating right at the edge of what two people could physically manage.
The first moment when everything started falling apart
In the summer of 2024, development suffered its first truly major blow.
Arachne underwent serious surgery. Complications followed, she was admitted to intensive care, and according to Dizzie's post, she came close to dying.
At that point, every previous deadline stopped mattering.
Dizzie wrote something then that feels especially sad in hindsight: for the previous three years, they had been crunching almost constantly, but Arachne's health finally had to become the priority. The game wasn't cancelled, but development was going to slow down significantly.
And honestly, it's impossible to blame anyone for that.
A game can wait.
Your health can't.
But that was only the beginning.
January 2025: "I'm going to prison"
On January 15, 2025, a post appeared titled "Extremely Sad Depressing News, Act III".
In it, Dizzie announced that she had been sentenced to three years in prison.
She did not reveal the exact charges at the time. She did say, however, that the case had started around five years earlier, that before becoming a game developer she had been a violent person, and that she had hurt a lot of people.
Importantly, she also wrote that the sentence was a consequence of her own actions.
In the same post, we learned that Arachne had completely left the project after recovering and no longer wanted to work in game development.
That left Fortune's Run with a single developer.
A developer who was going to prison a month later.
It's difficult to imagine a more absurd way for a game's production to be put on hold.
Dizzie still managed to release a massive update before leaving, adding, among other things, a new mission, a hub, quests, new enemies, expanded stealth mechanics, new AI, weapons, and environmental systems. At the same time, she admitted that after losing the person responsible for QA, she was handling development, testing, and bug fixing by herself.
On February 13, 2025, development officially stopped.
Dizzie announced that she was beginning her sentence and that Fortune's Run would no longer receive updates. She still said she hoped to return to the project one day.
At that point, it was easy to think:
Alright. I guess that's it.
Except it wasn't.
Fortune's Run was supposed to get a second chance
In April 2026, something unexpected happened.
On April 17, game journalists reported that she was staying in a halfway house and once again planning to continue development of Fortune's Run. The plan was surprisingly concrete: finish the missing story-critical levels, bring back a rebuilt location from the demo, create the finale, and finally push the game toward version 1.0.
At the time, Dizzie talked about a potential update within six to twelve months.
And you know what?
I really wanted to believe it.
After all that chaos, there was still a chance that Fortune's Run could pull off one of the most absurd redemption arcs in indie game history.
A developer gets out of prison, goes back to her computer, and finishes her strange, beloved project.
It sounds like a movie script.
Unfortunately, life decided to add one more act.
Kim and the bitterest twist in the whole story
During Dizzie's absence, Kim helped look after the project. In February 2025, she was the one informing the community that she would be keeping an eye on things while Dizzie was in prison.
Even after Dizzie's release, the situation still appeared positive.
Dizzie wrote that Kim was working a day job to help make it financially possible for them to bring Fortune's Run to version 1.0. They were planning to keep working together, and even talked about developing another project alongside it.
A few months later, the narrative changed completely.
On August 24, 2026, Dizzie published a post titled **"Game Cancelled Due To Gaben Personally"**.
And this is where we need to draw a very clear line between confirmed facts and accusations.
Dizzie accused Kim of, among other things, abuse, taking money connected to the project, and creating a situation where Dizzie herself was no longer receiving revenue from Fortune's Run sales. She also claimed that she had lost legal control of the project and that Valve refused to transfer ownership of the account and payouts to her. In her post, she cited roughly $77,000 in lost funds and around $9,000 that she claimed was still being held by Valve.
I have not found independent confirmation of these accusations against Kim.
So I am not going to present them as facts.
These are public allegations made by Dizzie, and without court documents, a statement from the other party, or other independent evidence, that is exactly how they should be treated.
There is, however, something else we can confirm.
Dizzie publicly stated that she would not continue developing Fortune's Run unless she regained legal control of the project and the revenue generated by its sales.
Two days later, another post appeared.
This one was extremely short.
According to Dizzie, Valve was removing her access to the game. The price had been dropped to one dollar.
And that was basically it.
"Goodbye everyone."
The saddest Steam description I've ever seen
If you visit the Fortune's Run Steam page today, you will still see the game listed as Early Access.
Except its description now begins with a huge warning written in all caps.
In it, Dizzie claims that control over the project's agreement was taken over by someone she accuses of abuse, that Valve refuses to transfer ownership, and that Fortune's Run will no longer receive updates.
It might be one of the most surreal epilogues I've ever seen on a game's store page.
Just a few months earlier, game journalists was reporting that development had resumed.
Not long before that, there was still a plan for version 1.0.
And today, the page of one of the most original FPS games of recent years displays a message that feels more like the final log left on a terminal inside some cyberpunk immersive sim than a Steam product description.
Except this time, it isn't environmental storytelling.
This actually happened.
And I think this is the part that hurts the most
I don't want to romanticize this story.
I also don't want to pretend that every decision made during the development of Fortune's Run was a good one.
I don't know Dizzie. I don't know Arachne. I don't know Kim. I don't know what exactly happened between these people beyond the fragments of their lives they chose to make public online.
What I do know is what I can see as a player.
I see a game made by people who had an **idea**.
Not a focus group.
Not a trend analysis.
Not a checklist of "what sells well on Steam right now".
An idea.
Fortune's Run was one of those projects where you sometimes look at a specific mechanic and wonder:
"Why did they even make this?"
And the answer is:
Because they could. Because they thought it would be cool.
And those are exactly the kinds of games we need.
Imperfect games. Weird games. Excessive games. Sometimes annoying games. Games whose mechanics feel like the developer had an idea at three in the morning and, instead of saying "that's stupid", opened their IDE.
Fortune's Run had character.
Early Access has another enemy
This story also reminds us of something we often forget.
When we buy a tiny indie game in Early Access, we are often not really funding a company.
We are funding **a handful of specific people**.
If a studio employs 300 people and one of them leaves, the project will probably survive.
If a studio consists of two people and one of them becomes seriously ill, the entire schedule can stop existing.
If a studio consists of two people and one of them becomes seriously ill, the entire schedule can stop existing.
If the other one later goes to prison, development stops.
And if, after her return, there is also a conflict involving money, ownership, and access to the project, there is no legal department, board of directors, executive producer, or emergency team waiting to take over.
There is just the end.
And that may be the most brutal lesson in the entire Fortune's Run story.
In AAA development, a project belongs to an organization.
At the smallest end of indie development, a project can become almost an extension of its creators' lives.
And when their lives fall apart, the game can fall apart with them.
Is Fortune's Run really dead?
I don't know.
And after reading several years' worth of devlogs for this game, I think I've learned one thing:
**never try to predict what will happen to Team Fortune six months from now.**
Still, the official situation at the beginning of September 2026 looks terrible.
Dizzie has announced that development is stopping. There is a conflict over control of the project. Steam currently states that there will be no further updates.
That doesn't leave much room for optimism.
Of course, somewhere inside me there is still a tiny:
"maybe someday..."
Because we've already thought it was over once.
Then Dizzie got out of prison and three days later was already outlining a development plan.
But this time, the problem isn't just time.
It's control over the game itself.
Goodbye, Space Cowboy?
Fortune's Run remains one of those games that reminds me why I still love the indie scene.
Not because it's perfect.
Quite the opposite.
Because it is a game that a large studio would probably never make.
Too weird.
Too complicated.
Too risky.
Too in love with its own mechanics.
And that is exactly why I'm so damn sad about what happened to it.
This entire story is full of people who made mistakes, made decisions, faced the consequences, got sick, split up, came back, tried again, and lost everything again.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, the game was left behind.
Unfinished.
Waiting for the final levels of its story.
Maybe one day it will get them.
I genuinely hope that a few years from now, I can come back to this article, add a huge **UPDATE: THEY ACTUALLY FINISHED IT** at the top, and laugh at how wrong I was.
For now, all I can do is look at Fortune's Run and think about how huge the difference is between a game that was bad and died because of it, and a game that was genuinely special but simply never got the chance to be finished.
The second one hurts a lot more.
**See you, Space Cowboy.**
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