"Your" mother is a travel writer who takes you and your cousin to Tiki Island, a resort that's recently fallen under a curse. Now, two main paths lie before you in order to remove the curse and escape the island alive.
The Twisted Tale of Tiki Island provides examples of:
- Artifact of Doom: The Tiki Eye, which you retrieve at the start of one storyline. Turns out the eye houses vengeful tiki spirits, but by destroying the eye you will then lift the island's curse.
- Bittersweet Ending: In one ending you actually have to kill your friend to break the Tiki Eye's curse. You're sad, but decide that you did what you had to; and resolve to make sure the curse can't continue.
- Cave Mouth: In one ending, "you" accidentally wander into the mouth of a giant sea monster lying in an underwater cavern.
- Didn't Think This Through: One part of the book has you and Gina running away from mutated sea creatures, but the way out is blocked by an electronic door. You can either operate the numerical door panel, or pick up an eel to short out the panel. If you choose the former, you suddenly realize that there's no way you can figure out the code in the minute before the creatures catch up with you.
- I Did What I Had to Do: One ending involves you actually killing your friend to stop the spread of the Tiki Curse. You're upset, but figure that you had no other choice.
- Evil Mask: Evil Tiki Masks shows up in a cavern in the second storyline where you found the Tiki Eye. Being Goosebumps, the narration takes a moment to reference the titular object from The Haunted Mask.
- Ghostly Death Reveal: In one bad ending, you and Gina are pursued by several Ghost Pirate skeletons. You might lose Gina at one point, and depending on your choices, you end up being trapped by a ghostly skeleton... wearing Gina's swimsuit. You then realize there's no escape, she's dead, and you're next.
- Ghost Pirate: Choosing to flee from the shark by entering an underwater cavern will have you being cornered by hordes and hordes of skeletal pirate ghosts looking for treasure. Subverted with one storyline revealing they're disguised human smugglers, but played straight in other paths where they're the real deal.
- No Fair Cheating: The book asks you to complete a maze when you are captured by an octopus. The maze has one opening and one fake opening. If you don't bother to do the maze and choose the fake one, the book tells you off for cheating and you turn into an octopus when you bite the one attacking you.
- Our Werebeasts Are Different: Yeah, the giant octopus that attacks you, depicted on the front cover? It's actually a were-octopus, and if you choose to, as a last-resort, bite its tentacles so it will let you go, it turns out were-octopuses converts their victims by letting themselves get bitten.
- Schrödinger's Gun: In one subplot, the ghost pirate skeletons turn out to be human criminals in disguise. In another subplot, they are real ghosts.
- Tentacled Terror: You might end up getting attacked by the hostile giant octopus shown on the cover, where the book gives you a chance to escape by completing a maze.
- Threatening Shark: What kickstarts your adventure; while snorkeling, you get attacked by a shark, forcing you to choose between two routes which leads to two different story branches.
- Tropical Island Adventure: The setting of the book.
