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The biggest surprise from the Fall 2025 anime season isn’t how popular shows like Spy x Family or My Hero Academia have been. Those are returning shows with massive followings thanks to their past anime seasons and popular manga. No, the biggest surprise is Gnosia, an anime based on a visual novel that combines the party game Werewolf with a touch of multiversal time-looping gameplay. Not just that this game got an anime adaptation, but that it is so damn good.

I wrote about the impending release of this show back when it was first announced. It was an intriguing but baffling thing. Gnosia is unusual even by visual novel standards; it has a gameplay loop that is ripped right out of Werewolf or Among Us. A spaceship has been infiltrated by mysterious aliens that look like regular crewmates but kill a character once a day. The humans onboard have various roles, like Engineer and Doctor, to help them figure out who the Gnosia is and can put one person into cold sleep per day. If they find all the Gnosia and put them to sleep, they win. If the number of Gnosia equals the number of humans, the Gnosia win.

Despite this gameplay loop, Gnosia is very much a visual novel. The main character, the player in the game or Yuri in the anime, is jumping between universes, with those infected by the Gnosia changing each time. Each loop is a unique puzzle to be unravelled with survival on the line. The only way to get free from the loop and get the “true ending” of the game is to play it over and over again to unlock new details about each of the bizarre characters on the ship.

The original Gnosia visual novel was a hit when it was released in 2019 for the PS Vita before it found new life on the Nintendo Switch a few years later. The gameplay is highly addictive and the characters include a talking dolphin in a reverse SCUBA suit, a mute living doll, and a certifiably insane space captain. All things that have helped the anime be one of my favorites of the season.

The most difficult thing for the anime to adapt was always going to be the non-linear structure of the visual novel. There is no set order to how you encounter the events in the game, so it isn’t something that is easy to translate into a series. Domerica, the studio behind the Gnosia anime, has done a remarkable job at making this as faithful to the original game as possible.

All the animation in Gnosia is good – better than the game, in fact, which featured no animation and instead used still images for the cut scenes. The voice acting and sound are all excellent; far better than you’d expect from an adaptation of an obscure, six-year-old video game. There are tiny little touches that serve as callbacks to the game’s mechanics, like the visuals on the result screen or the different locations you can meet up with different characters between meetings. 

It is genuinely rare to see an adaptation change so much of the source material and still manage to retain the heart of the original. The key with Gnosia that makes it work as an anime is the tension that comes in each loop. New “mechanics” are introduced regularly, as are the cutscenes that have to be earned in the game by meeting certain, sometimes obscure criteria. The whole experience is streamlined without feeling like we’re missing out on the fun bits.

They do such a good job of recreating Gnosia in the anime that I’ve already gone back and started playing it again for the first time in years. At first, it was just to compare the two versions, but now I’m enjoying both side-by-side in a way I didn’t expect to. The anime is different, for sure, but not worse. Not better. Just a different path on the same journey. There is still the mystery of what is happening and, more importantly, how Yuri can escape the endless loops. And as a fan of the game, I’m fascinated by what they will do with the ending. Without spoiling anything for people who haven’t played yet, the game required you to do some unexpected things with the settings to get the True Ending; how they’ll manage that in the anime is going to be a fun one to watch.

Would I be enjoying the Gnosia anime if I hadn’t already played the game? I couldn’t tell you. However, as a fan of the game, I’m loving the way they’ve adapted it as a series. It isn’t a direct adaptation, but that is probably better. I’m left guessing what is going to happen in each episode, which is exactly what the original game did so well.

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