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Nearly every anime you watch is an adaptation of something. Usually, it is a manga that has a huge following like the upcoming Sakamoto Days, but there are plenty of light novels and even visual novels that are getting the anime treatment these days. The recent news that Gnosia, a mind-bending visual novel that is a cross between Among Us and Everything Everywhere All At Once, is getting an anime adaptation in 2025 has me baffled, intrigued, and maybe even a bit hopeful.

Adapting Gnosia into an anime is such an odd decision that I’ve spent nearly a week trying to figure out the reasoning behind it. The game, which came out in 2019 for the Vita and 2021 for the Switch, follows the crew of a spaceship awoken from deep sleep with a startling revelation; one of them is a killer. You must investigate each person, trying to deduce who is the Gnosia, a parasitic race of monsters that spread and kill anyone they meet. Sometimes there is only one killer. Sometimes multiple. Sometimes the killer is you. It is very similar to a single-player Among Us except it uses a time-travel mechanic to string each game together into one plot as you try to escape the time loop with your life.

It is, admittedly, a weird setup, but it works… as a video game. Many of the mechanics are tied to the interactivity. Getting the final ending even requires you to break the system, similar to Doki Doki Literature Club forcing you to delete game files to escape. I had a load of fun playing it and I’m excited that more people are going to be exposed to Gnosia when its anime adaptation comes out next year but I can’t help but wonder how it is going to work.

How do the producers plan to capture the interactive elements that made Gnosia so fun to play? Is it going to be a linear story told in a time loop or will there be multiple stories woven together in a non-linear way? Who is going to voice the beluga whale in a fishbowl helmet, which is an actual character in the game? I don’t know and I’m intrigued.

Those are all problems that can be overcome through clever storytelling and picking one route through the plot to make it canon. And there have been good adaptations of non-linear stories in the past. Monogatari and the Neir: Automata anime are both good examples, but neither of these have plots tied so closely to the original’s medium. Gnosia’s ending relies on the player trying to escape the time loop by messing with the settings of the game to “break” the game. How can you capture that feeling of diving into the system in such a meta way in an anime where there is only one true ending?

That is the part of the Gnosia anime adaptation that I’m struggling to wrap my head around, yet, even as I wonder how it is going to work, I am convinced that I’m going to dive into this show as soon as it comes out next year. Why? Because I respect the ambition. Because I think that sometimes anime needs to be risky and try something weird. Because over three years after I played the game on the Switch, it still lives rent-free in my mind because of how unique it was. I want Gnosia to be as bizarre as possible. I want to barely be able to follow it. I want watching it a second time to feel different from watching it the first time. That is how this show is going to succeed in my eyes.

Gnosia might not be a property that is on everyone’s radar, but the anime should be. If it retains the ambition to tell a different story in a unique way, it could, if we’re lucky, be one of the weirdest anime of 2025. That alone is worth getting excited about.

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