McKinsey Solve Game 2026: The Two Tasks the Firm Names

What the McKinsey Solve game is

The McKinsey Solve game is a set of interactive, game-based tasks that McKinsey sends to candidates for most consulting roles before live interviews. It is the McKinsey online assessment, and the firm titles the page carrying it "Solve, McKinsey's assessment game". Its own digital assessment page calls it "a gamified assessment created to showcase your problem-solving abilities." No business knowledge is tested. Each task opens with an untimed tutorial.

The firm's interviewing page places it in the sequence: "One of the exciting steps in our process for most consulting roles is Solve, a gamified assessment that tests your natural problem-solving abilities." So McKinsey does not send Solve to everyone: its own wording is most consulting roles, and the invitation follows the role you applied for. What happens after Solve, for client-facing roles, is a personal experience interview and then a problem-solving interview.

Two sentences settle how much it carries. The digital assessment page says your performance "will be considered in conjunction with the rest of your application and any other assessments you are asked to take." The Solve FAQ answers the blunter version of the question, whether the firm will decide on your candidacy from Solve alone, with one word: no.

So the result travels with your file. It is one input among several, and the firm names no weight for it. Anyone who tells you Solve is a hard cutoff, or that it is a formality, has gone past what McKinsey has written down.

The two tasks McKinsey shows on camera

McKinsey's introduction video is embedded on the digital assessment page and runs five minutes and fifty-six seconds. It carries a human-written English caption track, and the captions name two tasks outright: "One on Red Rock Island and another aboard the Sea Wolf."

On Red Rock Island, the video says, "Dr. Conroy needs your help completing a study and several cases related to a research project." The data is already collected. Your job is to investigate and analyze it, then "report the conclusions that you make about your analyses in both written and visual forms."

The mechanics are described too. You use a research journal "to collect relevant information from all of the available data." Once the data is collected, labeled and organized there, the video says, "we provide a calculator to compute answers to specific questions." Calculations and answers are stored in the journal. Then comes the line worth copying out: "Showing your work is very important to demonstrate your thought process along the way."

Both sit inside one game, so the Sea Wolf and Red Rock Island are tasks rather than two separate assessments. Aboard the Sea Wolf, "a scientific research vessel," Director Samuels needs treatments made of microbes to clean up oceanic pollution. That microbe task is the second of the two. You learn to instruct an onboard microbe database, then assemble combinations of microbes through "a series of sorting and selection steps." The goal is the best possible treatment for each site. This task gives you a practice round first, which leads you through the whole process before anything counts.

Red Rock Island and the Sea Wolf, side by side

The two tasks ask for different work, and the video is explicit enough to tabulate.

Two things in that table deserve a candidate's attention before the clock starts. Only one of the two tasks hands you a practice round, so the Red Rock tutorial is the only warm-up you get there. And the Sea Wolf guidebook stays open while you work, which means memorizing rules is wasted effort on that task.

The video also tells you how much of this is stable. It says, "While every experience is unique, you will find all the essential information and tools you need within Solve itself." The FAQ explains the mechanism behind that sentence: Solve "uses advanced AI methods to ensure that there is ample variation in each scenario," and it is "designed so that no two individuals have the same parameters and combinations of data."

Imbellus, and the vendor McKinsey never names

The search term "imbellus mckinsey" exists because the link is repeated everywhere. We went looking for a primary document behind it and found none.

McKinsey names no vendor. Its digital assessment page carries none. Its interviewing page carries none. Its own four-page Solve FAQ, dated August 2025 and checked 7 October 2026, carries none either. All three route technical problems to a McKinsey address.

Imbellus, for its part, no longer trades. Its domain now answers 403 from a storage bucket. Its closing notice, read in an archived snapshot from 24 October 2025 and present in captures from January 2022 onward, says this: "Roblox Corporation is acquiring key intellectual property assets of Imbellus, a leading provider of game- and simulation-based assessment." It adds that several team members were joining Roblox, including founder and chief executive Rebecca Kantar and president and chief scientist Jack Buckley.

So the common claim gets the buyer wrong. McKinsey did not acquire Imbellus; Roblox acquired its key assets. We also read the archived site's JavaScript bundle, where the text of that site actually lives, and McKinsey appears there only as the source of a research survey on automation. The company never named McKinsey as a client on its own pages.

What follows for you is narrow and useful. Any page describing Imbellus scoring mechanics as the scoring of your sitting is describing a product whose assets changed hands years ago, with no document connecting it to the assessment you have been invited to take.

Your invitation sizes the Solve game, nothing else does

Here is the question that sends most candidates looking: how long does Solve take? The FAQ answers in one sentence. "The length of your Solve assessment is outlined in your invitation email."

Read that as a deliberate non-publication. The firm knows the duration and has decided to tell you individually instead of publicly, which is exactly how it handles interview details elsewhere. Any page quoting a fixed figure for Solve is quoting something McKinsey has not written.

The same logic runs through the assessment. The FAQ adds that each task "will begin with an untimed tutorial, which directs you to the task's objective and provides guidance on how to navigate the task." So part of your sitting carries no clock at all, and the published total you were given does not tell you how that time splits.

One rule is fixed, and the video states it plainly: "You must start and finish Solve in one sitting, so please be sure to schedule sufficient time to do so." The firm suggests finding a slot where you will not be disturbed. Our sister pages for the other two firms exist because their screens vary by office and route; see BCG's online assessments and Bain's online assessment for how those invitations differ. For McKinsey, the invitation does one job above all: it tells you how much time to block.

The integrity rules McKinsey wrote down

This is the clearest published part of the whole assessment, and it is worth reading before you click the link. Except as an accommodation for a disability approved in writing by the firm, you are not permitted to:

1. Use applications, websites, AI tools, or pre-prepared notes. The wording is that broad. A second browser tab is covered.
2. Record or capture screenshots of any part of the assessment. Also broad, and it rules out keeping a copy to study afterward.
3. Accept assistance from others. The firm writes that it expects you to participate alone.

McKinsey states the consequence in the same breath: failure to follow these rules "may result in exclusion from consideration, rescinding of an offer, restrictions on future applications, or legal action." The video adds that you accept this in writing before you start, when you agree you are taking the assessment yourself "without receiving any assistance from external tools such as generative AI or third party materials."

Two enforcement mechanisms are published. Scenario variation, quoted above, means comparing notes with someone who sat it last week buys you nothing. And the FAQ says, "You may also be asked at random to take an additional task in person and/or to explain your logic used." Your recruiter tells you if that applies to you. Being able to narrate your own reasoning out loud is therefore part of the preparation, whatever else you skip.

The video closes with a line candidates should weigh honestly, including against this page: "Remember, external guides may provide inaccurate or misleading information, so trust the resources provided to guide you." That is why every claim here carries the document it came from.

Six logistics that decide the sitting

None of this is strategy. All of it is published, and each item has cost someone a sitting.

1. A fault you do not report cannot be fixed later. The FAQ is explicit: if you hit a technical problem during Solve "and do not contact support, we cannot make any exceptions to allow for reset." The instinct to push through a broken screen is the expensive one.
2. Contacting support costs you nothing. The firm says the team "will work with you to resolve the issue" and will "offer you extra time or reset your link depending on the issue." Have the address ready before you start: technical issues go to [email protected], and a live chat exists too.
3. PC or Mac only. The FAQ answers the iPad and phone question with one line. The assessment is only available on a PC or Mac.
4. A tech check runs after you click the link. It tells you whether your device meets the minimum specification. Sound is not needed, and a mouse is optional. The video also recommends running the browser in full-screen mode.
5. Four languages are offered. English, Spanish and Portuguese, each in Iberian and Latin American variants, and Japanese. The firm asks you to pick the one you feel most comfortable in, which is worth a second read if English is your second language.
6. You can schedule it rather than start immediately. The video describes a Launcher Bot that checks compatibility, then lets you either begin or book a time and add the appointment to your calendar.

Accommodations run through your recruiter, and the firm asks you to raise them there rather than inside the assessment.

How to practice for the Solve game without learning content

McKinsey's own line on preparation is four words long: "There's no need to prepare." The FAQ is more specific. "Solve does not require previous business knowledge or gaming experience."

Both statements are true, and both are narrower than they look. What they rule out is studying material, because there is no body of content being tested. What they leave open is familiarity with the shape of the work, which is a different thing and which the firm itself supplies through its tutorials and its practice round.

A market exists regardless, and it sells Solve practice tests and simulators that imitate this assessment. Our review of one Solve simulator, and the price it declines to print sets its published refund thresholds against the firm's four word sentence above, and says why nobody, this site included, can check a simulator against an assessment whose content the firm asks candidates to keep to themselves.

So a rehearsal plan has three honest components, and none of them involves memorizing anything.

1. Practice triage before arithmetic. Red Rock gives you more data than the question needs. The skill being asked for is deciding what to put in the journal, then computing from that.
2. Practice narrating a conclusion. The video asks for conclusions "in both written and visual forms," and the FAQ warns you may be asked to explain your logic in person. Both reward saying the number and then saying why.
3. Practice reading a constraint set under time. The Sea Wolf asks you to satisfy stated conditions across a combination. The guidebook stays open, so the work is applying rules rather than recalling them.

Our scoring rubrics put weight where those habits live. On structuring, Coverage carries 45 of 100 in our grading code, which is the single heaviest dimension we use anywhere. Those weights are ours and no firm publishes a barème of its own; our method page shows how each one is computed. The free tools drill the same reasoning on business cases.

Two limits, stated plainly. Our assessment simulators reproduce the timing and constraints of these formats, and none of the six is live yet: the case content and timing rules are extracted, and the interactive runs are still being built. And our drills teach no Solve content, because Solve tests none. What they train is the reasoning the tasks ask you to show.

What McKinsey does not publish about Solve

Four absences, and knowing them saves you from pages that fill them in.

The pass threshold is the one people want most. Nobody publishes it, McKinsey included, so there is no McKinsey Solve pass rate on the record. Rates circulate and none of the ones we found named a source we could open. The firm also returns no Solve score to you, so there are no results to interpret afterward.

The task count is the second. The video calls Solve "multiple interactive, game-based tasks" and then says, "Let's take a closer look at two tasks." That phrasing shows two of an unstated number, and we will not turn it into a total.

One more absence is worth naming, because it is asked constantly. No McKinsey document we read states whether Solve uses your camera or records you. The integrity rules forbid you from recording the assessment, and they say nothing about the assessment recording you.

Access, for the record. mckinsey.com returns HTTP 000 to direct connections from our network, so all three documents here were read live through a text proxy on 7 October 2026, and the video's caption file was pulled from the video platform McKinsey serves it on. The firm's own recruiting FAQ page returned nothing to either route. For the interviews that follow Solve, our McKinsey case interview guide carries the four experience themes and the four practice cases the firm publishes.