Gaming, at its core, is just a series of puzzles: some meditative, some maddening. I'm Not A Robot splits the difference, turning the mundane act of proving your humanity into a spiraling test of pattern recognition that quickly escalates from a simple checkbox task into esoteric brain teasers that feel less like website security and more like psychological warfare.
Created by Neal Agarwal, I'm Not A Robot is a free-to-play riff on the CAPTCHA format, where players are tasked with completing randomized puzzles that include typing distorted text, clicking on traffic signs, spotting Waldo in a mural, or playing Simon Says on a soundboard. Streamers, ever the masochists, have turned it into a speedrunning meta to flex their cognitive prowess in front of their thousands of viewers.
But I am no streamer. I’m a casual gamer with bills to pay and sleep to chase. So I played I'm Not A Robot the way any normal person should: not testing speed, but my mental fortitude. I kept playing, advancing past each level until I either “won” or gave up. Spoiler alert: the latter came first. Yet, somewhere during the funky image text and pattern test to vibe check my humanity, I learned a few things about myself, namely, that I am a fallible human being and not nearly as good at logic puzzles as I’d hoped.
Glass half full, here’s a quick rundown of some positive things I learned about myself before we get to my unmaking.
Numerous puzzles where I was tasked with driving a car into a parking space had me discover that the tips I remembered from a TikTok video about parking translated perfectly to pulling off a parallel parking job, even through the directional keys on my keyboard. Having a touchable laptop screen also came in handy with drawing a perfect circle with my fingers on the screen. My eyes aren’t a slouch either, leading me to breeze past a puzzle where I was asked to single out which green square wasn’t like the others. Another challenge that surprised me was a test to accumulate and dump enough stocks, which I guess I can attribute to half paying attention to the brain-numbing parts of HBO’s Industry. Other challenges that stumped me in the early going simply boiled down to me reading instructions too quickly and missing the “not” part of its tasks or the “only” part of a specific row—a human error, making me not a robot.
But the cracks in my gamer facade began to show. The first logic test that stumped me was a sliding tile puzzle asking me to assemble a stop sign; these always stumped me for a bit before fiddling with them and coming up with my own logic. What I wasn’t expecting was a CAPTCHA knowledge check for Minecraft, asking me to make a diamond pickaxe. Reader, I’ve only played the game once in high school, so I was out of my depth. This took a while, something I’m not proud to admit as a games journalist. In so doing, I discovered that left and right clicks do different things in Minecraft with relation to sorting and splitting up inventory, which helped me stumble upon what I’m sure every five-year-old with an iPad already knew about how many sticks and diamonds a diamond pickaxe makes. Et viola, I forged myself a diamond pickaxe. I'm Not A Robot proved to be a slow boiling frog challenge at this point, but one where the count supporting that I am not a robot was still going strong.
But by level 34, I hit a wall—a math puzzle. In it, I'm Not A Robot tasked me with selecting all nine squares of algebra-ass equations I haven’t seen since high school and ordering them from least to greatest. Both the angel and devil on my shoulder noped out on this one. So, out of desperation, I pulled out a tactic any cornered gamer would desperately deploy in this situation: I started guessing. Clicking at random like a scrub who penciled in C on an SAT because “I haven’t selected that in a while,” I prayed that brute forcing my way through the math puzzle would carry me through. Obviously, the infinity symbol would be the last choice (I’m not that dense). Still failed. And with that, my journey to prove I wasn’t a robot came to an end.
However
I’d reckon my inability to solve such a fucked up math question while blinking away sleep proved exactly what this whole sisyphean charade sought to answer: I am still human. I am not a robot. So jokes on you, Agarwal. You didn’t best me, my friend. I won by the human act of quitting while I was ahead and throwing the double bird to a gaggle of math equations.
I'm Not A Robot didn’t just test my logic skills, it also challenged my resolve. Along the way, the game presented some clever and inventive puzzles to break up its stumpers. My favorite were out-of-the-box CAPTCHA puzzles (one literally) where I herded ducks back into their square grid or played whack-a-mole. While I didn’t beat it, I was reminded that being human can mean failing creatively, overlooking a crucial detail in instructions, and telling math problems to fuck off forever. The last of which might be the most CAPTCHA-proof trait of all.
Correction 9/22/25, 4:30pm: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the title of the game.
