Delores insists it isn't a Thimbleweed Park sequel — one review says otherwise

Born as a game-engine prototype and pieced back together from the original's leftover sets, Thimbleweed Park's photographer still carries an early-access label in the store's catalog.

A photographer, and a town pretending it hasn't changed

Terrible Toybox was blunt about it: Delores: A Thimbleweed Park Mini-Adventure is not a sequel to Thimbleweed Park. A review from someone who played shortly after release disagrees — it says the story picks up right where the original left off and, with no warning at all, spoils a big chunk of the plot for anyone arriving without having been through Thimbleweed Park first.

Delores Edmund is an adventure-game developer on leave from her job at MMucasFlem Games, back in Thimbleweed Park for a vacation. To help cover the bills, she takes a side gig as a photojournalist for the local paper, the Thimbleweed Nickel News. You recognize the street corners, but nothing quite fits: the neighborhood diner has become a five-star establishment, a plush teddy bear is suddenly the townsfolk's craze, the town clown wins a humanitarian award, and no one remembers the body that turned up under the bridge a year earlier.

The game began as a prototype for a new point-and-click engine Ron Gilbert was building, and grew into this short detour. The team repurposed leftover sets and characters from Thimbleweed Park to build new puzzles, ones that can be solved without ever leaving the house to look anything up — which is why newcomers who never visited the original town can still play without losing the thread, even if the full reference lands only for those who have been there. In the catalog, the title still carries an early-access label, an odd leftover for something the store itself treats as finished.

Thirty assignments, five at a time, with no saving in between

Players who tried it during launch week, in June 2020, praise the same mechanic: each session, the photographer receives five tasks and completes them before leaving the game. Come back and you get a fresh set of five, a little harder than the last. A review published in April 2021 reaches the end of the full list — thirty assignments in all — and describes the ending as a genuine closing scene, not a mere demo stopping point.

What ties these reviews together is the reuse: anyone who has played Thimbleweed Park recognizes the sets and the characters at once, and treats that as part of the charm rather than a shortcut. One person who already owned the original's source code — and so didn't think twice about grabbing this mini-adventure's executables too — sums up the mood: the trip back to town is worth it anyway. Another review recommends not shutting the game off the moment the credits start to roll: they hide jokes that close out the experience with humor rather than a blank black screen.

The generosity of all that reuse comes with a toll: get distracted in the middle of a batch of assignments and you lose it all, because there's no option to save your progress partway through. The very loop fans praise for growing harder each round is what shuts out any rushed session.

The oddness that grates, and the label that misleads

The complaints split into two different problems, and neither is about the puzzles themselves. The first is getting into the game at all: in October 2020, a player who already had Thimbleweed Park installed complained about not being able to launch Delores because it runs only on Windows 10, with no explanation from the store. In January 2022, another review points out that a Linux version does exist — Steam ships it — but GOG doesn't offer the same one.

The second problem is more recent, and it's about what the game delivers once it opens. A German-language review, published in July 2025, says Delores was sold as a mini-adventure but behaves like a tech demo, and that the wrong label sets up an expectation the game doesn't meet. Another, in Spanish and from the same year, arrives at a similar grievance by a different route: it complains of a muddled story, of a tonal mix that can't decide between drama and gag, and concludes that the short runtime mostly serves to promote the studio's main game. In the same week as that second review, a third, in English, gripes about the town's overload of weird elements and character interactions that come off as forced.

You arrive expecting an adventure the size of its name, and leave filing what you played under tech demo borrowing the wrong title. That's the line dividing the two waves of complaint: those grumbling about the platform just wanted to get into the game; those grumbling about the content wanted a self-contained adventure, and felt they got a sample dressed up as one.

Who Delores is worth opening for

This mini-adventure is a good fit for anyone who has already been to Thimbleweed Park and wants a quick excuse to return: recognizing the reused sets is half the fun, and the ending saved for those who complete all thirty assignments rewards that loyalty with a reference that only makes sense to someone who has walked those streets before. It also suits anyone patient enough to repeat a short loop several times over, since each round changes the tasks and nudges the difficulty up a bit.

It's a poor fit for anyone who wants a self-contained story in a single sitting: start without meaning to finish in one go and you lose what you'd already done, because there's no option to save your progress partway through. And it's a poor fit for anyone expecting, from the name, an adventure the size of the original — those who came in with that expectation left calling what they played a tech demo trading on a borrowed name.