My feelings on this are complicated.
Overall, I loved the idea of evolving the test in increasingly goofy ways. What I feel conflicted by is the introduction. On the one hand, starting on a few repetitions of the base captcha sets the mood to be properly subverted. On the other hand, the base captcha is not engaging, so it risks turning people off early.
Two options are to only have 1 base captcha, or show some progress meter, but both of those risk compromising the expectation subversion.
If you do find a solution where you maintain the expectation subversion while also making a more engaging hook into the game, lmk, I would be interested in seeing it.