Sour, sweet, gone? Cry me a river.

Is the plight of a Sour Patch Kid—the bouts of malevolence, the brief repentance and hollow appeasement before death—not the same as humankind’s? Don’t we all go through some tangy and cantankerous times? Don’t we all sugarcoat the past and dismiss the future as a death-defined void?

Or is Sour Patch Kids Cereal just churning my grey matter to the point of philosophical pontification?

I’m sure by this point you’ve heard the buzz and resultant public outcry surrounding Post’s latest outlandish cereal crossover. Many speak of it as a freak of nature, a forbidden union of candy and socially accepted breakfast candy. They fear it could rot teeth, and erode even a kitchen drain with its anticipated über sweetness. But hey, it got Andy Milonakis to quote tweet me, so maybe the Xenomorph blood-stained plumbing accidents will be worth it.

There’s only one way to find out, and it required me to wait for 15 minutes by a stack of clearance dog food while a Walmart employee fished one box (“really? just one box?”) out of the back of the store for me.

I feel it’s critical to note here that the surprisingly detailed SPK cereal shapes look like something you’d see between two faces in an optical illusion.

Important answer first: yes, this cereal is sour.

More important, and probably life-threatening answer second: yes, it is also painfully sweet.

Clocking in at over 33% sugar by weight, Sour Patch Kids Cereal can easily possess the cereal thrill-seekers among us. Where social media sentiment would suggest this is a spit-take worthy cereal, after my first taste I found myself wolfing down handful after dry handful. Not so much because I liked it, but because I’d simply never had a cereal so downright strange. And because of this astronomical velocity of gastronomy, I feel I am truly a changed man, and bear a virtuous need to present in front of 3rd grade classes about the dangers of Sour Patch Kids Cereal.

See, where I expected the flavor to be primarily raspberry (blue or regular), Sour Patch Kids Cereal’s taste lies at a cursed intersection between real(ish) and fake fruit. There are distinct notes of Trix’s lemony-limy citrus, but also the nebulous tropical bursts of Froot Loops. It’s like the Trix Rabbit and Toucan Sam tried to have an omnipotently fruity child, but the cereal gods punished them for their cross-brand sacrilege with a lightning strike.

Indeed, the sour bite of Sour Patch Kids Cereal isn’t puckering—the thick layer of powdered coating softens the blow, at the cost of consistent mouthfeel—but it is electrifying. It briefly sizzles on your palate, before fizzling out as soon as it’s cleared your uvula. Coupled with the the psychological texture trick of an airy cereal shell where you’d expect something gummy, plus the astronomical velocity of gastronomy ate it at, Sour Patch Kids Cereal is simultaneously a palate pleaser, a stomach upsetter, a brain’s unthinkable nightmare, and a dentist’s dream come true.

If only Colgate supplied the free prize inside.

While dry Sour Patch Kids Cereal is a technicolored mixed bag of green stomachs and blue moon-delight, adding milk is a pretty universally bad idea. The concurrently sweet and sour madness is subdued, sure, but the pieces become squirm-worthy gummy guppies and the milk gets just sour enough to taste acidically overdue for a good hoisting out the window.

Or at least a hurling.

No novelty is fun enough to make me want sour cream and lemons, but the fun of even just a few dry bowls is worth the price of admission. The cereal is exclusively available at Walmart in giant-sized boxes until summer, so unless you want to synchronize stomach rumbles as family bonding, it might be best to wait for a normal amount of servings per container. That way when the novelty wears off, you’ll probably have just enough left to build a battery capable of turning on your garbage disposal.

Great try though Post: I invite you to keep up the mad flavor alchemy. Because as the old saying goes, “if you can’t be the most popular cereal brand of all time, be the lawless one that invented Sweet & Sour Chicken Cereal.”

The Bowl: Sour Patch Kids Cereal

The Breakdown: A truly unique cereal eating experience, there’s something for everyone: tropical limes, edible fly zappers, and the chance to make fruity buttermilk for next week’s lemon creme pancakes.

The Bottom Line: 6 big-beaked bunnies of 10