The Fall Anime 2025 Preview Guide – Gnosia

What is this?

The Gnosia lie. Pretending to be human, they’ll get in close, trick and deceive, and then eradicate each person in the vicinity from the universe, one victim at a time. The crew of a drifting spaceship, facing off against a mysterious and deadly threat known as the “Gnosia” and having no idea who among them is really the enemy, formulate a desperate plan for survival. The most suspicious among them will be put into “cold sleep” one by one, in an effort to completely rid the ship of Gnosia. However, it is almost impossible to tell whether each person put into cold sleep was really Gnosia, or simply a poor, unfortunate scapegoat sacrificed by the Gnosia for their own survival.

Gnosia is based on game developer Petit Depotto‘s Gnosia sci-fi social deduction RPG. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

How was the first episode?

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

This is a textbook case of a show I very much want to like but just can’t. From the clownish outfits to the claustrophobic (yet somehow predictable) story, Gnosia feels too much like the tutorial for the game it’s based on, setting up a repeating loop of Yuri desperately being reborn again and again to try to find the “Gnosia” in the crew. It’s like rainy-day recess game of “Werewolf” that never ends.

Or at least, that was how I was left feeling after twenty-six minutes of this. Yuri’s unceremonious awakening from a medical pod is the barest of starting points, with their (his?) amnesia treated as a relatively natural jumping off point for plenty of explanations about the setting and the plot. Poor Yuri is no soon awoken than they are forced to take part in a vote to find the Gnosia hiding among the remaining people aboard the spaceship, with the most obvious person being chosen by the group. Just as predictably, they’re wrong, and then wrong again, sending Yuri to what would have been their doom had not Setsu given them a strange cube with what appears to be the ability to travel back in time over and over again. And lest you think that Yuri can just point to the (obvious) answer this time, the ending theme points to it being a different Gnosia every time they loop back.

Is this loop we’re watching even Yuri’s first? That’s the most interesting angle so far, although if each time they return to start they regain more pieces of their memory, that could be interesting. This kind of time loop, in the Higurashi: When They Cry vein, has a lot of potential for good mystery storytelling with a sci fi bent, and with the pesky set up out of the way, this could really take off next week. But this episode is filled to the brim with self-consciously quirky characters, in-world terminology, and the illusion of information that doesn’t hold up when you stop to think about it. The art is interesting – I don’t love it, but it doesn’t give me a headache even if I find it overwhelming – but I’m left with the impression that this might be better played than watched.

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