"You" and your family are visiting the Museum of Natural History in New York City, when your bratty little brother runs into a lab where a time machine is being tested, and manages to get himself lost in time. Now "you" must go through different time periods to find and rescue him before he ceases to exist.
Tick Tock, You're Dead! provides examples of:
- Annoying Younger Sibling: Denny, the reader's rebellious little brother who's always getting into trouble, constantly whining and refusing to do as he's told.
- But Thou Must!: In typical GYG manner, the first choice the book offers you is whether to volunteer yourself to test a prototype Time Machine, or look for your kid brother who went missing in the museum. Choose the latter option and the book nags at you for being such a wimp, tells you to take a minute and reconsider your choices before going back to make another decision.
- Character Catchphrase: "You're not the boss of me!" appears to be Denny's. He uttered this line fourteen times throughout the book!
- Death Before Dishonor: If you challenge the knight to a duel and win, the knight will deliberately throw himself into the crocodile-infested moat, to your horror.
- Disintegration Chamber: In the future school setting, students are punished for not knowing the answers to absurdly hard questions by being sent to the "frammilizer", a metal box that "hums, then glows bright green", after which the unfortunate student simply disappears.
- The Dog Bites Back: The story is based around you having to travel in time to find your bratty little brother, who ran off and got lost in a time travel experiment because he insisted "you're not the boss of me!" and wouldn't listen when you told him to stay put. One of the best endings is you being crowned king of a medieval kingdom, smugly saying that now you are the boss of him, and making him your slave.
- Explosive Decompression: One bad ending, which involves the reader getting thrown out the airlock of a space station after getting caught by robots, and exploding on exit.
- Failure Is the Only Option: There's an entire storyline of this. Your main choice in the book is whether to go to the past or future to find your missing brother. If you go to the past, only one path leads to a good ending, and even then, it only works on dates that have even-numbered days. All other paths lead to either a bad ending or the start of the future storyline. One of them does advise you to search in the future next time, just so the reader doesn't get too frustrated.
- Same with if you end up in a ride-along with the truck driver in the one day in the future scenario. The accelerator jams, and the truck driver faints. So you have two options, take the steering wheel, or go for the brakes. If you take the steering wheel, you swerve to avoid your family, but the truck is still moving with the story ending with you going straight at a brick wall! Go for the brakes? That's actually the better decision as you stop the truck before it reaches your family, unfortunately a bunch of fish delivery trucks were following way too close and your little manuever causes them to crash and spill their fishy payload all over the street causing you to abort your mission to find Denny due to the stench.
- Giant Spider: One of the threats in the medieval timeline, with you being trapped in its web.
- Grounded Forever: Early in the story, after your brother Denny disappears into the time machine you worry your parents will have you grounded for the rest of your life.
- Help Yourself in the Future: One of the plots involves you going only one day in the future, you then watch as your entire family, yourself included, gets run over by an out of control semi-truck while halfway across the street, however you can change the timeline and avert the incident from happening.
- Intercontinuity Crossover: The future timeline where you end up in a school run by robots will have them quizzing you on A Night in Terror Tower, specifically what magic items are needed for travelling through time. Appropriate, since both this book and Tower have Time Travel as a main plot.
- Kids Love Dinosaurs: The dinosaur exhibit is one of the few things in the Museum of Natural History that actually interests "you", being just a kid.
- Museum of Boredom: In the first few pages, you consider the American Museum of Natural History as one of these, and wishes your parents would bring you to visit one of the "cooler" places in New York, such as the Rockfeller Center or the Twin Towers. Of course, in real life the American Museum of Natural History is anything but.
- Never Smile at a Crocodile: One ending sees "you" get thrown into a moat full of hungry crocodiles.
- No Ending: There's an ending where you choose to stay and watch a dinosaur hatch, only to find that you were watching a prehistoric chickennote hatch. For some reason, this is an ending even though there's nothing to imply that the book ended at this point.
- Not Where They Thought: At one point, you think you're on a plane when really you're on a spaceship.
- People Zoo: The future timeline have you being thrown into a human zoo by your robot captors, as part of the "Couch Potato" exhibit.
- Quicksand Sucks: One of the bad endings in the medieval timeline have you and Denny drowning in quicksand.
- Rapid Aging: The Corridor of Time seems to have the ability to do this to whoever stays there too long (your younger brother is already an old man by the time you arrive).
- Ret-Gone: The book is based around you trying to help your brother escape from a weird time-travel experiment before he is erased from time forever.
- Robot War: The future scenario have you arriving in a world taken over by robots, and you're forced to join the human La Résistance against the robotic overlords.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: One ending is you being content with returning to your own timeline without your little brother who always disobeys you and puts himself in danger multiple times. Probably as a compensation for your hard efforts in saving a truck driver and the "future counterpart" of your family from dying in a traffic accident, this does NOT count as "Bad Ending".
- Time Travel: The book revolves around an experiment in time travel, and the player character must jump through different time periods to rescue their brother (who jumped into the experiment first).
- Trail of Bread Crumbs: At one point in the medieval storyline, you come across a trail of Gummi Bears - candy that doesn't exist in said period - while searching for Denny, and realize he must be somewhere nearby. It's unknown if Denny deliberately drops the Bears to clue you into his location or not, though.
- Unishment: Subverted. If you pick the zoo punishment, you wonder why it's considered a punishment since you love visiting the zoo. It turns out the punishment is actually becoming an exhibit in the zoo.
