Within the area of serious games research, there is significant potential for researchers and other stakeholders to use serious games to gain more fundamental understanding of the underlying cognitive processes of individual users or participants. In this research, we present the results of an experiment to benchmark a visual search task presented in a 3d game-like environment with a standard, controlled, lab based implementation. Our results show similar trends in performance measures across experimental conditions in the two environments, however, participants were faster and more accurate overall in the 3d game-like environment. There is significant potential for researchers and other stakeholders to utilise serious games platforms as a means of measuring human cognition within environments that are visually more closely related to ‘real-life’ than those used in cognitive psychology.