How to solve Bastille of Agility challenges in Nightingale

Bastille of Agility challenges are one of the many random encounters that can earn you Essence and other rewards in Nightingale, and they might just be the hardest of them all to complete.

The lowdown given by the game’s How to Play menu tab is essentially that you need to use agility—namely jumping and climbing—to reach a hidden reward somewhere in mysterious Fae architectural remnants. That sounds simple enough, but actually completing one of these Bastille of Agility towers proves to be anything but. What I’ve found is you shouldn’t approach them as an “agility” challenge at all. Really, they’re a test of wits. Here’s how to complete Bastille of Agility puzzles in Nightingale.

Nightingale: Bastille of Agility challenges, explained

Bastilles of Insight, Intellect, and Agility in Nightingale all become available as random encounters on the map once you reach your Antiquarian Realm. These challenges follow the same basic format as Puzzle Core challenges, but include added difficulties in exchange for better rewards.

The added challenge for each Bastille type is supposed to correlate with the name, naturally meaning a Bastille of Agility should be a test of dexterity and nimbleness. However, this really isn’t the case at all. Or at least, it doesn’t have to be.

Figuring out what you’re actually supposed to be at a Bastille of Agility is sort of the hardest part of solving them. Somewhere in the ruined tower making up the encounter (they will all be marked on your map after completing the Fae Tower) is a Hope Echo that you need to reach and release to solve the Bastille.

The Hope Echoes in Bastilles of Agility are said to be “hidden,” but really they’re just inaccessible. Chances are you won’t have any problem locating them—it’s actually reaching them that proves difficult. They will always be somewhere high up and tricky to reach, such as at the top of a tall lone pillar with no nearby objects to jump from. Reaching that isolated Hope Echo solves a Bastille of Agility, and while it feels underwhelming, you can see on your map that the Bastille is marked as completed afterwards.

Nightingale: How to reach the Fae artefact in a Bastille of Agility

The intention in these challenges is definitely that you’re supposed to use Climbing Picks and possibly Potions to reach the Hope Echos needed to solve them, but after spending a solid 20 minutes trying and failing to climb to the Echo in my first Bastille of Agility, I was able to figure something else out.

You don’t need an Estate nearby to build a staircase in Nightingale, and this fact is the only way that I’ve been able to consistently complete Bastille of Agility challenges. After finding the Hope Echo, which is always high up in a difficult to reach area, you can simply build a staircase or two to reach it. I recommend still having Climbing Picks out so you don’t need as many staircases (you can build one or two and then climb the rest of the way), but building is definitely the key to solving these things.

In fact, I’m not at all certain every Bastille of Agility can actually be solved without a bit of cheese. It’s possible I missed something, but I really couldn’t figure out any way to organically reach the Hope Echo pictured above using only jumping and climbing like the game says to do. Insert building, and it became a cake walk. If you ask me, these are the ones that should be called Bastilles of Intellect.