How Code Breaker works
Jill Summers, an occupational psychologist at Arctic Shores, described Code Breaker on the company’s own podcast. You try to stop a moving dial on a given number, which unlocks part of a code, and work through a series of codes to open a safe. You stop it with one press, the space bar on a computer or a button on your phone, at the moment the number is in the right place.
It does not hold still. The dial moves at varying speeds and changes in response to how you interact with it, and the number you need to stop on changes as well. An Arctic Shores screenshot shows the screen: the digits 0 to 9 around a dial with a shaded segment, the code entered so far in the centre above a “Locked” label, four lights beside the dial, and a Stop button marked with the Space key.
What Arctic Shores says it measures
Summers named several things the task picks up. Core cognition and processing speed, because you have to think quickly as the dial moves. Perseverance: when you stop on the wrong code the task tells you so, and how you respond, including how long you take to get back into it, is measured. And determination, which she linked to “delivering results” at work.
She also described the data behind it. Arctic Shores collects about 12,000 data points per candidate, such as how you click, whether you pause after negative feedback and how long you spend reading, and feeds them into scoring keys that it validates like any other psychometric tool.
How it is scored
The scoring keys are secret. Summers says Arctic Shores never gives them away to anyone; instead each employer agrees a success profile that candidates are screened against, and results are put in context against a norm group. So there is no published number of codes you need to crack.
Two further points from Arctic Shores matter if the format worries you. It says its research found no statistical difference between people with hours of gaming experience and people with none, and it can apply scoring key adjustments for conditions such as dyslexia and dyspraxia. Its help centre lists fine motor or coordination difficulties among the reasons to request an adjustment, and adjustments must be declared before you begin.
How our practice version works
Our version is called Security Door. A red wedge marks the digit you need and a grey wedge sweeps around a 0 to 9 dial; press Space or tap Stop when they overlap. There are four levels of six digits each. Each level sweeps faster with a narrower wedge than the one before, two run anticlockwise, and the motion alternates between a smooth glide and a stepped jump.
The differences matter. Our speeds are fixed per level rather than reacting to how you play, and our passcodes are the same every run. A wrong stop sends you back to the first digit of level 1, and you can quit at any point. Because Arctic Shores keeps its scoring keys secret, our score out of 100 is our own, built from levels completed, mistakes, accuracy, improvement across attempts and time spent.