We introduce Tik Tik, a novel video game designed to study problem solving. The game’s structure enables the creation of problems that range from trivially simple to highly complex. Across three studies, we demonstrate how to experimentally manipulate players’ focus on finding optimal solutions. Moreover, we identified two structural parameters, the optimal solution length and the truncated search space size, that determine problem difficulty. These findings establish Tik Tik as a viable serious game for investigating search in problem solving.