Sky Sight

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

A city of the future. That's what they called Agona; the isolated experiment, built for efficiency and technological integration from the ground up. Cameras and microphones are everywhere, super computers buried beneath the city serve as processors to judge the actions of everyone living within it, dealing out real life karma.

For years, peace reigns. The city is the envy of many, a place of prosperity and wealth. Then a number of trains malfunction, being routed through the city's blue external barrier, and the game begins. Gaining positive karma no longer gives discounts on goods, it gives otherworldly abilities, supernatural powers.

But gaining negative karma gives those same abilities as well.

The barrier surrounding the city becomes charged, turning anyone who wishes to leave into a pile of ash. Forced into the seemingly impossible game of good and evil, the new residents of the city must decide which side they're on or remain helpless.

Cover Art by Monique:https://matchaocity.artstation.com/

Information

Status: Hiatus
Year: 2019
Author: TwinLampSky

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.0/ 5.0
Followers: 34
Views: 26,612

Reviews

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Community Reviews(4)

SubjectiveSliderRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
While it has only started, I have great expectations for this story from these two chapters.
ArthicernRoyal Road
★★★★ 4.0
Sky Sight starts out with a pretty decent introduction in the first arc where it establishes the shift in setting as well as the two protagonists and the stories first antagonist, with each of these main characters being fairly well written.
In fact I had a particularly liking for the story's first revealed antagonist, the child Zero, with her personality frequently flitting between whimsical kindness and cruelty in a way that most of the adults watching her view as monsterous, despite being how a number of precocious children that age would act given the cirumstances thus far revealed.
Now the second story arc on the otherhand has a few pacing issues here and there where it feels like the fight scenes are a bit rushed at times in favor of getting to the next bit of plot.
But all in all, despite a few hiccups here and there, these first couple of arcs have done a fairly decent job of establishing a setting and events that can be built off into a longer running story, and I am interested in seeing where it can go.
GarrdorRoyal Road
★★★★ 4.0
I've enjoyed this story so far. To sum it up, it's a system apocalypse story on a city-wide scale, engineered (presumably) by the AI of that city for unknown reasons. Here's some stuff that's in the story.
It's a fairly unique setting. Pre-story, the city was an experiment where the monitoring AI have rewards for having "good karma", and good and bad were the opposite ends of the scale. Now, you can simultaneously get levels for good and bad karma, and get abilities for either. Already you can see the shades of grey moving into the characters.
That makes the characters pretty neat. The people who lived in the city previously now have to adjust to there being benefits for negative actions, some bad guys bussed in to add spice get to run wild, and some newbs have to make up their own code of ethics from scratch.
The characters seem pretty real, a few people seem to have snapped without society but mostly people are just trying to get by, with craziness so far happening as an unseen backdrop for people trying to adjust. Although one of the characters is a psychopath child who's overpowered, she's treated more as a malignant capricious force of nature. The side characters make sense internally in the story was well.
Story seems like it can go somewhere, right now everyone is still in the "is this really happening" honeymoon phase, I assume it's going to get darker soon. Gotta figure out what's up with the AI and why eventually, and some character based plot points that ticking along.
I like the fact that the scope of the story is as small as it is, globally in stories like these we really don't usually get a sense of how society is changing, but on this scale of a couple thousand people you can see the wheels start to come off.
It's well written, no mistakes especially jarring to the eye, good word choice and grammar usage you all know what well written means on royalroad.
Here are some less positive descriptions, a few points I don't like as much:
Unexplained scoring s
LooseLeafOolongRoyal Road
★★★★ 4.0
First the good:
The concept of commands and Kara and Bara are unique and interesting. Though there are some parallels to Maze Runner and Hunger Games, the concepts are new enough that it makes the story a worthwhile read.
The story had a very strong start. I enjoyed Arc 1 a lot more because the world description was on point and it really set the mood for the story. The characters actions and unsaid words contributed greatly to the setting which is how it should be. I had a good feel for the characters in Arc 1.
Some comments:
First I must disclose I'm not huge on point systems and levels that make things Lit-RPG-like but I didn't let that affect my review and tried to focus on how the points contributed to the story.
That being said I'm still not really clear on what the points of Karma do exactly. Since Arc 2 focused a lot more on the action than the characterization, I was hoping to get an explanation for this "new system update" of "split Karma" but I'm a bit confused. Is it because the characters also don't really know yet? Hopefully what the points do exactly will come in Arc 3.
The dialogue in Arc 1 was very good but in Arc 2 you get into the "talking like you think, rather than how you actually talk" for some of the characters. This is common for all writers I think, but with the strong dialogue of Arc 1 I was surprised to find this trend in Arc 2.
I'm having a hard time understanding the motivations of the characters and where they're coming from. Arc 1 seemed to point in a really good direction in terms of building on the characters, but then at the end of Arc 2 I was left not knowing more about Abel and Lyssa than I did in Arc 1.
Overall:
It's a story I will continue reading and I think the author got out to a strong start. Compared with a lot of other stories this one is very easy to follow in terms of who's who.
That being said the system is a bit fuzzy, though this could be revealed as the characters learn more about the "new update" themselves. I'd li