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Warning: This article contains spoilers for 007 First Light.
Developer IO Interactive hasn’t been shy about hoping 007 First Light is the beginning of a new James Bond video game series. After a 14-year absence from gaming, Bond’s return is a cultural event, and 007 First Light‘s origin story does a lot of legwork introducing both this new take on the spy and the intelligence community around him. A major piece of the puzzle is Isola, a mysterious woman Bond encounters throughout the game, and the biggest dangling thread that sets up a sequel.
007 First Light is a rare depiction of Bond earning double-0 status, as he’s just been recruited to join His Majesty’s Secret Service as the double-0 program is brought back decades after it was shuttered. This leaves a lot of room to continue Bond’s tale after the fantastic 007 First Light, which is already doing more concerted world-building than the pre-Daniel Craig film eras, including teasing some major, potentially familiar characters for a sequel.
Who Isola Is Actually Working For In 007 First Light
While Bond, his fellow double-0 recruits, and their mentor, John Greenway, are on a mission to the Grand Carpathian Hotel in Slovakia to intercept the former 009 – who ostensibly betrayed MI6 and went into hiding, causing the collapse of the double-0 program – the fledgling spy encounters a woman who claims to be Charlotte Roth, a member of the Direction générale de la Sécurité extérieure. The DGSE is the French intelligence agency, essentially the nation’s MI6 counterpart.
Bond appears to naively believe her, but is later informed by Moneypenny that the real Charlotte Roth is much older than and looks nothing like the woman in Slovakia, who was also pursuing 009. Bond runs into the woman again in London, and she says her name is Isola, but neglects to say who she works for. As circumstances see the two continue to work alongside each other, she claims that Nicolas Webb was responsible for her parents’ deaths. This too appears to be a lie, made in the interest of manipulating Bond, whose parents died in a ski accident when he was young.
By the time credits roll in 007 First Light, we don’t actually have any concrete idea of who Isola’s client is – or if Isola is her real name. She has taken the THEIA core and disappeared. When M joins Bond at Greenway’s tombstone, she officially grants him the codename 007, and they discuss a shadow organization that is a complete mystery to MI6, an existential threat to the intelligence community. While unconfirmed, this is almost assuredly a reference to SPECTRE.
SPECTRE Is A Bond Staple & Is Teased To Return In Potential 007 First Light Sequel
As if the SPECTRE tease and Bond being newly christened 007 weren’t enough, 007 First Light ends with a card reading, “James Bond will return.” This isn’t necessarily outright confirmation of a sequel; it’s a tradition for James Bond films to end with this phrase. IO Interactive told IGN, however, that the studio wants 007 First Light to be the beginning of a trilogy, and the game seems already well on its way to being a success.
Bond fans will likely catch onto the hint immediately, but for the uninitiated, SPECTRE is the closest thing the franchise has to a main villain. Established by Bond creator Ian Fleming to stand for Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion, SPECTRE is now most commonly depicted as a wealthy, far-reaching, independent organization exerting its influence on geopolitics. SPECTRE is led by criminal mastermind Ernst Stavro Blofeld, an iconic, influential villain code-named Number 1.
In the Craig-era films, Blofeld (played by Christoph Waltz) is Bond’s adoptive brother, but this was never part of the character’s previous iterations, including Fleming’s imagining of him. Similarly, Fleming’s SPECTRE is a smaller band of criminals, rather than a multinational syndicate.
007 First Light implies that Isola has taken the THEIA core to her client, SPECTRE, which is a terrifying unknown to MI6 at the end of the game. Webb was seemingly a SPECTRE pawn, and if a quantum computer could be built by the organization, then the THEIA core could be used to harvest data from all over the world, just as it was being used at MI6. The question of THEIA’s accuracy remains, but such a powerful tool would certainly be put to use by SPECTRE in a sequel to 007 First Light.
- Released
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May 27, 2026
- ESRB
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Teen / Blood, Language, Suggestive Themes, Violence, In-Game Purchases
- Developer(s)
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IO Interactive
- Publisher(s)
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IO Interactive
- Number of Players
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Single-player