"You" get dropped off at the wrong sports camp, and made to pick one of two special paths — an athletic competition, or a wilderness hike. Both are dangerous though, and now you must survive aliens, zombies and killer animals.
Escape from Camp Run-for-Your-Life provides examples of:
- Alien Invasion: One bad ending from the Camp Running Leaf storyline results in the aliens Coach Rex secretly serves deciding to invade Earth with a full armada.
- And I Must Scream: In one ending you decide to take a skeleton's skull for the scavenger hunt but the skeleton immobilizes you and turns you into a skeleton and it into a human while you wait for someone else to make the same mistake you did.
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In one ending, the people running the camp are arrested for kidnapping, conducting business with an alien government without a license, and the most serious offense of all: not paying tax.
- Devoured by the Horde: The zombie ending have this happening to you in more than one scenario. Or, if you're feeling like a dick, you can ditch your partner Kim to be devoured while you make a run for it. Unlike the norm for these books, you can get a good ending out of this.
- Enemy Mine: In one of the storylines, you're forced to team up with a girl you hate in order to survive (although many of the bad endings involve her leaving you to die to save her own skin. You get to do the same to her in one good ending, though).
- Food Fight: If you don't feel like eating the blue eggs in the camp (which is a good idea) you can throw them at the camper next to you, starting an egg-throwing contest where you end up being lectured by the camp counsellor. Also counts as Failure Is the Only Option, since all endings obtainable after that point are bad ones.
- Genre Savvy and No Fourth Wall: One of the choices has you deciding whether or not to eat some blue eggs. If you choose to eat them, you will suddenly stop, remember that you are in a Goosebumps book (where eating weird-colored food is usually a bad idea), and spit the eggs out. It turns out that the eggs cause you to become an obedient slave of the aliens running the camp.
- Karma Houdini: You, in the scenario where you abandon Kim to devoured by zombies. This leads you to one of the good endings and the book doesn't even berate you for doing so.
- The Quisling: In the Camp Running Leaf scenario, it turns out the Camp counsellor, Coach Rex, was bribed by a hostile alien race to train campers into becoming human slaves for the aliens.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Both camp scenarios have this as an alternate ending. In Camp Running Leaf, you can flee the camp by stealing a prized mountain bike and peddling out of the place before Coach Rex catches you, while in Camp Pendleton you can forgo the camp hike and simply leave by avoiding zombies. You don't get the best endings if you do so, but at least you're alive.
- Summer Campy: The story is set at a sports camp — Camp Running Leaf, which claims to be a renamed Camp Pendleton (where you're supposed to go) where things go strange.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: The hiking storyline have you being partnered against your will with Kim, an annoying girl you dislikes, and you'll need her along with you or risk getting knocked off a cliff by a wild mountain goat. There's actually an ending where you can abandon Kim to be devoured by a horde of zombies, and the book actually rewards you with a good ending for doing so!
- This Is Gonna Suck: Cornered by a horde of angry zombies, you delve into your zombie survival kit... and realize it to be a mere sewing kit. But then, you have an idea to help the zombies stitch their limbs together, which they happily complies... once you're done, the happy zombies starts a tap-dance, and rips their stitching in the process. So the zombies are angry again, and you're right in the middle of the entire pissed-off horde.
- Weird World, Weird Food: Camp Running Leaf serves blue eggs. Turns out those eggs are meant to make humans easier to control to be sold off to hostile aliens.
- With Friends Like These...: "Friend" is somewhat a stretch, but getting partnered with Kim, a girl you dislike, have more than one ending where she abandons you to be eaten by zombies. But then again, one ending have you doing so yourself.
- Zombie Apocalypse: A possible ending involves the Cemetery Man successfully turning everyone on the planet into zombies.
