See her? That red-haired, doe-eyed dame looking all innocent at the top of this Frosty Cereal?

It’s her fault. All of it. The turmoil afflicting our world, the sallow tension draped over everything, the insidious doom oozing from every earthly orifice: or The Baconated Blight of Wendy, as I like to collectively call it.

You see, if Wendy’s social media accounts hadn’t decided to kickstart an insidious trend of sassy, apathetic, and terminally online brands, I’m convinced we wouldn’t be in this mess. I truly loathe the soulless snark of faceless corporate entities, and for that I can never forgive Ol’ Gwendolyn or her new Frosty Cereal here.

It doesn’t help that this cereal really phoned it in component-wise, pairing boring chocolate spheres with the worst marbits imaginable—but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s see just how Wendy’s Frosty Cereal fares in my bowl…

…and if I hear one cocky clapback from the girl on the box, I’m heaving the whole thing in a gravel pit.

Aw, balls.

That’s simply how I feel about the never-ending proliferation of boring corn puffs in the cereal aisle. Granted, I can’t exactly picture what other shape a Frosty Cereal would take, but you’d think with the combined wealth of Wendy’s and Kellogg’s (speaking of which, who pays who for a cobranded cereal like this?) we’d at least get something a little ritzier than unadorned maize rounds.

Regardless, Frosty Cereal spheres look just like Cocoa Puffs, but they’re about 10-15% tastier. Sure, the corn is undeniably there as a distracting, choco-conflicting base note, but Frosty Cereal does a better job of masking it with a cocoa glaze than something like Sonny the Cuckoo’s fare. I certainly wouldn’t say there’s any authentic milkshaken richness in these puffs, but the so-so cocoa is indeed given a needed accent of creaminess, thanks to the marbits.

However, these marbits really emphasize the “bits” part of the name. They are my least favorite cereal marshmallow shape imaginable—little chiclet nuggets that are so small that a) they all settle at the bottom of the cereal bag and b) they take up swift residence in any and all molared crevasses. Even the attempt to infuse cocoa into the marbits can’t save them from their sheer geometric obnoxiousness—like clingy fungal spores, they seem insistent on hitching a ride in between your teeth so they can sprout somewhere else later.

While Wendy’s Frosty Cereal is a pretty forgettable dry cereal, it logically gets better in milk, where, with the added creaminess, you can sort of fool your brain a little more into believing that this approaches the delicacy of a real dairy dessert.

As you can see by the brown sludge flecking my bowl, Frosty Cereal is very prompt and efficient about flavoring your endmilk, which is truly the best part of the whole bowl.

Overall, Wendy’s Frosty Cereal is a slightly above-average Cocoa Puffs clone, but I just can’t see any reason to settle when there are better options in the breakfast aisle. Why not just spring for the more indulgent Chocolate Peanut Butter Cheerios, or if you want a straight-up chocolate charmer, Kellogg’s already has a better base-grained contender in its catalogue with Chocolate Eggo Cereal. Like a middle-stage Pokémon, Frosty doesn’t feel like a fully evolved cereal. This veritable Poliwhirl of a breakfast has potential, and chocolate fans won’t hate it, but it’s too easily outclassed to be competitively viable.

Call me when you find a King’s Rock, Wendy.

The Bowl: Wendy’s Frosty Cereal

The Breakdown: Perhaps even more disappointing than an outright bad cereal, Frosty Cereal does enough right to be palatable, but nothing exceptional enough to be worth buying over chocolate cereals that use oats and wheat. Plus it loses points for maddening marshmallow morphology.

The Bottom Line: 5 world-dooming wry remarks out of 10