Oh, thank goodness. There’s a new Life out—this current one’s been getting pretty stale. I think 2020 was its expiration date. I can only imagine that living a chocolate life is gonna be a heck of a lot sweeter than the plain one I have every day.

Wait, you mean Quaker’s new Chocolate Life Cereal doesn’t include a free immersive Matrix pill as the prize inside? I have to just eat the stuff and pretend I’ve been thrown down a perspective-shifting rabbit hole? Yeugh. This new cereal ride is quite the lemon already.

That said, Chocolate Life is, from the outset, more exciting than the long-running, Mikey-beloved cereal brand’s other latest spinoff varieties. Because unlike the light flavor-glosses found on Vanilla or Strawberry Life, Chocolate Life actually features visible cocoa-infusion at the base grain level.

But is it enough to overcome my disdain for Life as a road-rolled facsimile of Chex? Only time will tell—and not a lot of time, at that, before things get soggy.

Let’s make one thing clear: this is no Cinnamon Life. Try as they might, Life has never released a variety that even comes close to their genre-defining cinna-sweetened great. Though I will say Chocolate Life comes the closest out of any of the Quaker Oats Guy’s previous lives. The chocolate flavor is far from rich and fudgy, but the glimmers of cocoa powder that seep particularly into this cereal’s aftertaste are charming and unique. They remind me of Nesquik, in particular, as even when eaten dry, these chocolate notes come off as milky, if not sweet-creamy.

As with any Life variety, this stuff really shines when you amp up that milkiness factor with the real, sloshy thing. Life absorbs an absurd amount of milk, so unlike real life’s best parts, you can’t really afford to stop and savor each Chocolate Life spoonful for too long, lest you be left with sopping, lumpy choc-oatmeal. But if you do give in to indulgent desire and unceremoniously snarf up your Life mid-soak, your brevity and levity will be rewarded with what is essentially a low-fat chocolate milk sponge—the many multigrain squares amalgamating into a single blob of dairy-diluted wheat pasted with cocoa butter like the world’s dampest piñata.

You know what they say, folks: that’s Life. Not terribly memorable but certainly tasty for the milk-happiest among us, Chocolate Life is an inoffensive, delicately choco-basted new release that’s best enjoyed Nesquik-ly.

The Bowl: Chocolate Life Cereal

The Breakdown: Like a more wholesome, less crunchy Cocoa Puffs, this Life is a solid chocolate cereal for those whose taste buds haven’t normalized other cereals’ intense sweetness. Whether you add milk or not, this is a flash-in-the-pan new release that’s unlikely to make it into any end-of-year scrapbooks.

The Bottom Line: 7 bowls of flattened DIO’s out of 10