007 First Light Guide: How to Win the Aleph Auction

Walking into a high stakes black market auction is incredibly stressful right up until you realize the entire event is completely rigged in your favor.

Once you finally manage to scrape together the entry cash by grinding through the 100K auction fee objectives, you and Greenway get to sit down at the big table. Your ultimate goal here is to secure the winning bid so you can meet Bawma and track down 009. The game presents you with a series of tense dialogue choices and timed reactions. Before you freeze up trying to calculate the perfect response, let me save you some anxiety. You have absolute plot armor here. There are no actual wrong answers during the conversational phases.

The Illusion of Choice

The auction plays out in a few distinct phases. You have to pass a polygraph test to verify your identity, place a starting bid, and then counter the other criminals in the room.

Auction Phase	Your Options	The Outcome
Phase 1: The Polygraph Test	1. This man hates me. 2. Call me James. 3. Thrilled to be here.	Any choice you make instantly turns the polygraph green. Pick whatever sounds the funniest to you.
Phase 2: The Opening Bid	1. 8 Million USD. 2. 3 Million USD. 3. 1 Million USD.	Aleph does not accept cash. Every single option fails and forces you to pivot your strategy.
Phase 3: The Counter Offer	1. Remove Scorpius from Aleph. 2. Next-gen solar panel blueprints. 3. Two long-distance missile strikes.	Ali considers every single one of these to be a wonderful offer. Pick whichever favor you feel like granting.

Sabotaging Mr Leung

After your initial cash bid inevitably gets rejected, the other criminals at the table start throwing out their own offers to outdo you. You need to thin the herd before it comes back around to your turn.

Wait for Mr Leung to step up. When he places his bid, simply pull up your Q-Watch and hack his polygraph machine. The readout will flip from green to red, immediately disqualifying him from the room. It's a delightfully dirty trick that sets you up for the final showdown.

Surviving the Panic Button

After you place your shiny new counter offer from the table above, Miss Bachchan decides to ruin your day. She undercuts you by offering an exclusive contract directly to Bawma.

This is the only part of the auction where you can actually fail. An "Improvise" button prompt will flash on your screen with a rapidly depleting timer. Hit that button immediately. If you sit there staring at it, you will fail the mission and have to reload the checkpoint.

Pressing it forces James to blindly offer up three decades of highly classified MI6 intel. It's a wildly reckless move that probably gives M a heart attack back in London, but it successfully wins the auction and keeps the story moving forward.

If you survive the rest of the campaign and want a palate cleanser after all this stressful undercover work, you should know that IO Interactive is already teasing the Valhalla Protocol update. It promises to add a massive new driving sandbox so you can finally put that Aston Martin to good use.