Arctic Shores Assessment (2026): Tasks, Traits & Honest Prep
By the Game Assessment Prep research teamUpdated July 28, 2026How we research
The Arctic Shores assessment is different from most tests you can prepare for, and any guide that does not say so up front is selling you something. It is a task-based psychometric assessment: instead of answering questions, you complete short interactive tasks while the platform records thousands of behavioral data points — Arctic Shores' own site says candidates "don't tell us how they'll perform. They show us." The output is a trait profile compared against an employer's job-fit benchmark, not a mark out of 100.
That design has an honest consequence for preparation. Some of what Arctic Shores measures is cognitive — attention, processing speed, pattern recognition, numerical reasoning — and those skills respond to practice like any other timed task. Much of it is behavioral — risk tolerance, drive, interpersonal style — where there is no "correct" answer to rehearse, and pretending otherwise mostly produces inconsistent data. This guide separates the two, so you spend effort where it can actually help.
What the assessment is
Arctic Shores (founded 2013, UK) delivers its assessment through an app — historically branded Skyrise City, with custom-branded versions for some clients — that runs on desktop and mobile. Candidates receive an invitation directly from Arctic Shores with login credentials and a completion deadline. The assessment is largely untimed overall, though individual tasks have their own time limits, and the company recommends completing it in one sitting.
According to candidate reports and preparation sources reviewed in July 2026, an assessment consists of a series of short tasks — the exact set varies by employer, with up to roughly nine levels in a typical configuration. Behind the scenes, the platform collects thousands of data points (Arctic Shores currently claims over 12,000) and scores around 30–34 personality and cognitive traits, mapped in reports to sections like Personal Style, Cognition, Drive, Interpersonal Style, and Thinking Style, each on a 1–10 scale against a norm group.
Two more official positioning points worth knowing. First, Arctic Shores markets the format explicitly as resistant to AI-assisted cheating — "one of the only assessments on the market future-proofed against ChatGPT" — because tasks measure behavior rather than answers that could be looked up. Second, there are officially no right or wrong answers, and in-game points are not the evaluation: your behavior is compared with a job-fit profile the employer configured.
The reported tasks
Arctic Shores does not publish a task list; the names below come from candidate reports and prep-industry sources, and your assessment will include a subset chosen by the employer. The commonly reported tasks:
| Reported task | What you do | What it reportedly measures | Trainable? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Balloon task | Inflate balloons for money; each pump risks a burst | Risk tolerance, reward motivation | Not meaningfully — it profiles preference |
| Order | Infer the next frame from a sequence, under a per-item clock | Logical reasoning, attention to detail | Yes — pattern drills transfer |
| Direction (arrows) | Identify a middle arrow's direction among distractors, many fast rounds | Focus, selective attention | Yes — classic flanker-style attention task |
| Tile sequence | Reproduce growing sequences until errors end the run | Working memory | Yes — memory-span practice transfers |
| Tickets | Sort items under rules that change or disappear | Processing speed, rule switching | Partly — format familiarity helps |
| Energy / generator | Learn a system's pattern by acting on it | Learning agility, impulsivity | Partly |
| Team sales | Repeated pricing decisions with feedback | Decision-making, fairness, risk | Not meaningfully — behavioral |
| Expressions | Match faces to one of several emotions, many rounds | Emotion recognition | Yes — recognition accuracy improves with practice |
| Analysis | Multiple-choice numerical reasoning under time | Numerical reasoning | Yes — standard numeracy practice |
| Predict (night & day) | Predict outcomes from repeating probabilistic cues | Statistical learning, decision confidence | Partly |
Treat every row as candidate-reported, not official. Employers configure different sets, and Arctic Shores updates its battery — its newest addition is marketed as a task-based measure of learning agility.
Which employers use Arctic Shores?
Arctic Shores claims more than 350 client organizations. Names that appear in its own case studies and in candidate reports include Siemens, PwC, KPMG (custom-branded app), Metro Bank, Capita, Thales, Arcadis, Molson Coors, The Adecco Group, WSP, and several UK public-sector and legal employers. Coverage varies by programme and year — the fact that a company used Arctic Shores for last year's graduate intake does not guarantee your process includes it. Your invitation email is authoritative.
How scoring works — and why you cannot game it
The report an employer sees is a trait profile: each measured trait plotted on a 1–10 spectrum against a comparison group, matched against a benchmark profile for the role. Points, coins, and level progress inside the tasks are engagement mechanics, not your score.
This is the key difference from a cognitive test like HireVue's games: there, faster and more accurate is simply better, so practice directly raises scores. In a behavioral task battery, much of the signal is which trade-offs you naturally make — pump the balloon more or bank early, price high or low after losing a customer. There is no universally good answer: a high risk-appetite reading fits some roles and not others, and you do not know the benchmark. Trying to impersonate a profile you guessed at tends to produce inconsistent behavior across tasks, which is itself measurable.
What you can legitimately improve is the cognitive slice — attention, working memory, processing speed, numeracy, emotion recognition — and your composure. Unfamiliarity is the biggest avoidable cost in any assessment: a candidate who has never done an n-back or flanker-style task wastes attention decoding the format while the clock runs.
Honest preparation
- Do the official practice level. Arctic Shores includes one with the invitation. It is the only rehearsal of the real interface you will get — use it before the real run, not after.
- Train the trainable formats. Working-memory span, rapid attention tasks, timed mental arithmetic, and emotion recognition all improve with focused practice. Our free simulators cover the same underlying formats: Digitspan for memory span, Numerosity for timed arithmetic, ShapeDance for rapid visual comparison, and E-motions for emotion recognition. These are HireVue-style simulators, not Arctic Shores replicas — what transfers is the cognitive skill and the time-pressure composure, not the interface.
- Answer the behavioral tasks naturally and consistently. Read each task's instructions fully, then behave like yourself on a focused day. That is not resignation; it is the strategy that produces the most coherent profile, and coherent profiles read better than impersonations.
- Set up like it matters. One sitting, charged device, stable connection, notifications off. The assessment being "untimed overall" does not mean interruptions are free — flow matters when individual tasks are clocked.
- Research the role, not the test. Knowing the competencies the employer cares about will not let you fake traits, but it will help you decide whether the role fits you — which is, bluntly, what this category of assessment is checking from the other side.
FAQ
Can you fail the Arctic Shores assessment?
There is no published pass mark, but employers do use the profile to sift: if your profile is far from the role benchmark, you may not advance. Officially there are "no right or wrong answers" — that is about individual tasks, not about the sift decision.
Is the Arctic Shores test timed?
The assessment as a whole is generally untimed, but many individual tasks impose their own per-round or per-section limits. Budget 60–90 uninterrupted minutes and complete it in one sitting.
Can I practice the real Skyrise City tasks in advance?
Not the real ones — access requires an employer invitation, and the login expires at the deadline. The invitation includes an official practice level. Beyond that, you can train the underlying cognitive formats (memory, attention, arithmetic, emotion recognition) on free simulators, including ours.
Does practicing actually help if the test measures personality?
For the personality-flavored tasks, no — and be suspicious of anyone selling guaranteed trait outcomes. For the cognitive tasks (reasoning, memory, attention, numeracy), yes, in the ordinary way that timed cognitive skills are trainable. This guide's table marks which reported tasks fall in which bucket.
Is Arctic Shores the same as HireVue or pymetrics?
No. All three run game- or task-shaped assessments, but they are different vendors with different batteries. HireVue games are skill-scored cognitive mini-games; pymetrics is a trait battery built on behavioral-economics paradigms; Arctic Shores is a task-based behavioral platform. Check your invitation for which vendor you are actually facing — our game-based assessments guide compares them.