Everyone’s got that one friend. The one who, regardless of whether it’s a Chuck E. Cheese, a fancy Italian restaurant, or a WNBA game, will always order chicken tenders with fries, choosing a safe palate bet at the expense of every other higher risk, higher reward option.

Now Oreo O’s is being that friend.

No, not because they’re making a chicken nugget-flavored cereal, but because they chose the most milquetoast and (literally) vanilla Oreo flavor to cereal-ify out of a nearly bottomless bestiary of zany sandwich cookie flavors.

We could’ve had Mississippi Mud Pie Oreo O’s! The first cereal unspellable without a 3rd-grade geography education!

But I suppose this doesn’t mean Golden Oreo O’s will be bad—as an Oreo O’s diehard since childhood, I’m still excited my fav has been revived and now revitalized within a year. I may just have to sub in some real Oreo O’s if the taste has me saying “Uh Oh!”

Anyway, let’s untwist and lick this bag full of evolved wistfulness.

First observation: these suckers are chunky. I think Oreo O’s have been dipping into the cookie jar a bit since their American return—begging the question of what an Oreo eats. Hydrox?—because every sunny hoop here is thicker than a bowl of oatmeal made with soft serve ice cream instead of milk.

Second observation: these suckers are also easy to suck down, and that’s because by now, they have a very familiar flavor. See, after tasting their near-overwhelmingly sweet, golden-toasted shortbread flavor, Golden Oreo O’s immediately self-categorize themselves into the “Frosted Animal Cracker Cereal” phylum of my personal breakfast taxonomy.

The third in a recent wave of cereals like this, Golden Oreo O’s—or GOO’s, for short—falls somewhere between the two on a spectrum of tastiness. More potently sweet than Unicorn Cereal, but not quite as nuanced in its buttercreaminess as Pink Donut Cereal, Golden Oreo O’s emerges from my first taste test as a solid mindless munchie.

Because its flavor is totally authentic to its namesake cookie…’s wafer. With pops of lightly brown-buttery vanilla doughiness, these Saturn-dwarfing rings are tasty, if a bit simplistic—think Nilla Wafer Cereal, minus the Banana Pudding and processed through a Play-Doh machine. Similar to normal Oreo O’s, but far worse, Golden Oreo O’s lack a palpable creaminess behind their nearly graham-like, mostly sugar cookie-like base taste—let alone an authentically oiled and addictive Oreo cream flavor.

But hey, I get it: it’s a tough taste to replicate. That’s why LeCour’s unfortunately named “Creme Betweens” are, well, historically unfortunate.

Eaten dry, GOO’s may be a mild-mannered snack desperately in need of its South Korean counterpart (and early 2000s Xtreme Creme predecessor)’s marshmallows, but in milk, this hitherto milquetoast meal gets marbit-esque reinforcements from dairy’s like-minded creaminess.

It’s not enough to set Golden Oreo O’s above Pink Donut in my tongue’s gastro-memory, but milky GOO’s (if I type that ever again, please tranquilize me) come close enough to “Golden Oreo Cookies Lite” that I’ll happily plow through these vanilla sugar wafer halos until they outlive Pink Donut on cereal shelves—which I’m predicting due to the latter rosy pastry cereal’s limited distribution.

And hey, if they make it ’til Christmas, I can just douse ’em in powdered sugar and call it “Well-Rounded Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch.”

The Bowl: Golden Oreo O’s Cereal

The Breakdown: Practically Girl Scouts Trefoil Cereal, what these vanilla shortbread bites lack in nuance they make up for in safe goodness, especially when matched with milk’s faux-‘mallow emulsification.

The Bottom Line: 7.5 misplaced shouts of “GOO-hoo!” out of 10