"Your" cousins have come to visit from England, and have each brought a crate full of armor and a curse. Choosing one will send you on a bizarre adventure, and you must survive long enough to get back home safely.
The Knight in Screaming Armor provides examples of:
- Animated Armor: The titular armours, which the book identifies as "The Good Knight" and "The Evil Knight". The latter is sentient, and awakens itself in the dead of night, dragging you and your cousins into an adventure all the way back in Medieval England.
- Baby Morph Episode: In a story within the book, you and your cousins revert to babies. In a good ending, all three you revert back to your original ages, but in a bad ending, only you remain a baby. Your fate is unknown, if you stay that way, if you de-age even more, or if you eventually get to grow up.
- Black Knight: The main villain of the adventure, a suit of armour made of black metal once belonging to an Evil Knight who gained sentience.
- British Stuffiness: For your British cousins; averted with Kip Saxton, who hangs out well with you, but played straight with Kip's older sister Abby Saxton who often "sounds like she's a queen".
- But Thou Must!: The beginning of the book gives you the option to ignore the cursed armour's screams and wait until morning. Choosing that choice... and your cousin will drag you out of bed to the garage to investigate the armour.
- Death by De-aging: In one plot thread, you and your cousins find themselves falling foul of a time-controlling clock and regressing into infancy over the course of the next few minutes. With your friends having mentally regressed as well, it's up to you to stop the clock before it rewinds you to a time before you were born. You manage to stop regressing and restore your friends to their former ages, but for no adequately explored reason, it doesn't restore your age, unfortunately; as such, this plot-line ends with you being cuddled by one of your cousins as you bawl your head off. For now, you're still alive, but it's never made clear what'll happen to you next - if you're stuck reliving your entire life from square one, if you're permanently a baby, or if you really will suffer the Death by De-aging you saved your cousins from.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin:
- The main villain is called "The Evil Knight". He is indeed very, very evil.
- Also, the book's title sounds like R.L. Stine making a random Pun on the saying "Knight in Shining Armour". But as it turns out within the story, the Evil Knight's armour is indeed capable of screaming — your adventure is kicked off when you hear the sound of mysterious screaming coming from the garage where the armour is kept...
- Evil Old Folks: The three-headed gardener.
- Fire-Forged Friends: You become this with Abbey in most of the endings. You start out disliking her, and while she seems pretty bitchy and imperious at first, she ultimately turns out to be a pretty good person.
- For Doom the Bell Tolls: The resurrected ghost monks can be put back to rest if you ring a bell on a church tower. Actually doing so without getting killed is harder than it sounds, however.
- Golden Ending: In the best ending, you manage to defeat the Knight singlehandedly. After this, you wake up in your bed and both your cousins are fine. It seems like it was All Just a Dream, until you notice the tiny crumpled remains of the Knight's armor on your floor.
- Intercontinuity Crossover:
- The titular object of The Cuckoo Clock of Doom shows up during this adventure, and much like in the original story, screwing with it indiscriminately will result in Rapid Aging for you.
- Actually, as you find out if you mess with the cuckoo clock, it does not change your age - other clocks do. In fact, the ending involving the cuckoo clock outright states that it was actually "not the cuckoo clock of doom after all".
- Shortly after the Evil Knight comes to life in it's armour, you are then attacked by legions of Mud Monsters. Fittingly enough, in their original debut, these monsters are said to be born of restless souls of unfortunate Medieval-era peasants.
- You can also encounter King Jellyjam in one of the dungeons.
- The titular object of The Cuckoo Clock of Doom shows up during this adventure, and much like in the original story, screwing with it indiscriminately will result in Rapid Aging for you.
- Losing Your Head: This fate can befall you and your cousins as you enter a trophy room full of disembodied heads. All three of your heads will end up being swapped, and you must find a way to get them re-attached while remotely controlling your body before the decapitation becomes permanent.
- Madness Mantra: The ghost monks' chant, which they repeat ad nauseum the moment they materialize in front of you (this inadvertly gives you a clue on how to defeat them later on):"No bell tolls for us! No bell tolls for us! No bell tolls for us!"
- If you manage to ring the bell, they briefly change to chanting "The bell tolls for us" before disappearing entirely.
- The Maze: A difficult hedge maze is an unavoidable part of your adventure, and if you fail to solve it, the book then says you'll succumb to becoming part of the soil and feeding the plants which made up the hedge. However, it is easy to avoid this ending as this book, unlike many others in the series, allows you to cheat without any repercussions.
- Moon Logic Puzzle: In one section, you're being chased up a bell tower by some ghost monks, who want to make you one of them. You reach the bell, and there is a kettle of black liquid, which probably won't even harm ghosts, and when you reach for the bell, the monks cower, which means they obviously fear the bell for some reason, so naturally you next choice is to ring the bell. No! What you're meant to do is pick up the kettle, which is too heavy for you, and then fall over and ring the bell by accident! Pulling the rope to ring the bell causes it to break, giving the monks time to catch up to you...
- Muggle in Mage Custody: In one of the bad endings, the Evil Knight turns you into one of his personal guardsmen.
- Multiple Head Case: The three-headed gardener has... three heads. And attempts to (and in one bad ending, actually succeed in) transform you and your two cousins into a fused-together monster with one body sharing three heads.
- Or Was It a Dream?:
- In one of the good endings your cousins believe you had a nightmare about the curse on your family, but you come across a pile of burned metal, proving it wasn't a dream.
- In one of the bad endings, you managed to escape the hedge maze and return to the present... without defeating the Evil Knight. You then assume your entire adventure to be a dream and decide to go back to bed. But then the Evil Knight shows up at your bedside.
- Proud Beauty: "Your" cousin Abbey. She starts out just seeming like a jerk but turns out to be more of a Lovable Alpha Bitch by the end.
- Pun: At one point in the adventure you can come across a young page-boy in training, who identifies himself as page-boy no. 48. The page you meet him? Page 48.
- "Knight" and "night" are repeatedly also used as puns. In one ending, you tell your cousins "good night" and the Evil Knight replies "Evil knight".
- Rapid Aging: In one section, you and your cousins are being aged rapidly by the Keeper of Time, but you manage to kill her by speeding up time yourself, as she is already older, so she ages and dies first (though it's pretty close, seeing as how fast you are all aging).
- Skewed Priorities:
- In the trophy room full of heads, your cousin Kip is so pre-occupied making faces at a gargoyle that he doesn't realize his sister's head has been swapped (you did). Or the same thing is about to happen to him.
- Played for Laughs at one point: when the three of you almost get electrocuted but survive, Abbey's main fear is that she won't be able to get her hair to curl again.
- Taken for Granite: You can enter a valley full of statues, victims cursed by the Evil Knight after failing to escape. And yes, you might end up becoming one of the statues if the Knight catches you.
- Taunting the Transformed: In one of plotline, you play around with a time-controlling clock that ends up regressing you and your cousins to babies, but it takes a few minutes for anyone to realize the danger. Until then, your cousins poke fun at each other as they get younger, with Abbey teasing Kip about how chubby he is all of a sudden, while Kip retaliates by pointing out how short Abbey's gotten and laughs at how huge her clothes are.
- Time Stands Still: In one section, you can find a three-faced clock. You can then learn the hard way in one bad ending that the handless face of that clock stops time forever if you touch it.
