007 First Light Guide: How to Win the Aleph Auction
Walking into a high-stakes black market auction feels 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. Skip the anxiety of trying to calculate the perfect response. You have absolute plot armor here, and there are no actual wrong answers during the conversational phases.
The Illusion of Choice
The auction plays out in three distinct phases: passing a polygraph test, placing a starting bid, and countering the other criminals in the room. Here is exactly how every stage unfolds so you can just click through and keep the story moving.
The Polygraph Test: You get three options to verify your identity ("This man hates me", "Call me James", "Thrilled to be here"). Any choice you make instantly turns the polygraph green. Pick whatever sounds funniest to you.
The Opening Bid: You try to throw cash at the problem with options for 8 million, 3 million, or 1 million USD. Aleph doesn't accept cash. Every single option fails and forces you to pivot your strategy.
The Counter Offer: You offer favors instead. Your choices are removing Scorpius from Aleph, handing over next-gen solar panel blueprints, or ordering 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 flips 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, 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'll 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 bypasses a frustrating game over screen.
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 [suspicious link removed]. It promises to add a new driving sandbox so you can finally put that Aston Martin to good use.
