'I got lonely': Why a 21-year-old theater major built an escape room in his UCLA dorm

“Code Green” has the trappings of a modern escape room.

We enter what we are told is a hidden bunker-turned-research lab. It’s dark, but there are clearly challenges that surround us: patterns in the walls, a cork board filled with notes and images connected by string and, before us on what appears to be a concrete table, a small puzzle board with many of its twisted pieces — something akin to strange, otherworldly tools — missing.

The trend today is escape rooms with a heavy narrative — see “The Ladder” from L.A.’s Hatch Escapes, a multidecade corporate mystery — and “Code Green” is cognizant of this. In the game, the year is 2085, aliens have invaded Earth and an important researcher has gone missing. We are to explore her secret scientific hideaway and find out what happened to her. Oh, and this bunker is flooded with radiation that can mutate us. We need to find a way to turn that off.

But it soon becomes apparent that “Code Green” is not a typical escape room. The walls? Cardboard, with paper bricks taped onto them. The low ceiling? It’s made of construction paper. Hanging blankets create the boundaries of the space. If you pull them apart, you’ll find yourself in a cluttered nook where a desk rests atop a bunk bed next to a wall filled with posters, including one of musician Andrew Bird.

The escape room industry has exploded over the last decade, with an estimated 2,000 facilities in the U.S., according to a 2023 industry report from Room Escape Artist, an enthusiast site that maintains a running database of every known room in the country.

But “Code Green” is not one of them, for “Code Green” is built inside a dorm room on the UCLA campus by 21-year-old Tyler Neufeld, a theater major with a specific interest in design. It’s cozy: Four people can’t navigate the space without constantly moving around one another. Yet for the past eight months, Neufeld, a Bakersfield native, has been running the free “Code Green” escape room for fellow students and their friends while juggling 22 units, his role as a resident advisor and a part-time job as an office assistant. On a recent Sunday, he hosted three 60-minute games.

When I visit on a Wednesday evening, the bespectacled Neufeld is nervous. He stresses that “Code Green” is intended for students only, with sign-ups done via an online spreadsheet. Participants, he says, need a UCLA email address. Though he isn’t hiding the escape room — he says his resident advisor office and teachers know about it and he posts “Code Green” availability updates on his “Dorm Scapes” Instagram — it hasn’t been officially sanctioned by the school. He’s aware that press attention may bring it to a halt (a spokesperson for UCLA did not return requests for comment).

But after a moment, he shrugs, and says, “It’s worth it,” clearly wanting some recognition for what he has built.

“What happens if they shut us down? It’s fine. We made it this far,” adds Michaela Duarte, 26, a fellow theater major who has done some production design on the space.

While Neufeld’s escape room has helped expand his social circle, attracting attention from students like Duarte who want to work in the intersection between theater and theme parks, perhaps there’s also a bit of a thrill of running something of near professional quality out of a dorm room.

Most of “Code Green’s” brainteasers are text-based — a note in a research book may lead us to a cipher challenge, which in turn will reveal a map, which is actually a code to decipher the hidden pattern of the taped-on cardboard bricks. Remove the right one, and find another note.

Neufeld, or one of his friends, serves as a “game master,” hiding in the closet pretending to do alien research while offering hints, which can be verbal or written on the backside of a TV monitor propped up with cardboard.

Neufeld estimates he built the room for less than $100, and it’s constructed entirely out of found or trashed objects. “I have experience from student theater, where they give you zero dollars,” he says. “I wanted to think of what I had and what was passable. I didn’t want to to go too sci-fi, like being in a spaceship. That would look bad. But I can do stone. I can do brick. That’s not hard. It’s just time-consuming.”

Spend a little time playing “Code Green” and you’ll detect additional giveaways that this is a dorm space. That concrete slab of a table we see when we first enter? That’s actually Neufeld’s fridge, filled not with clues but with items such as oat milk. (Duarte affixed painted styrofoam to the refrigerator’s body, giving it an aged metal-like sheen.) Same with the dresser, although Neufeld noticed people couldn’t help digging through his clothes, so there are in-story notes in there.

Some puzzles in “Code Green” are visible only under blacklight.

(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

“Honestly, they’re in here because I don’t have anything else to put in the drawers, and I wouldn’t want the drawers to be empty,” Neufeld says of keeping his clothes accessible to guests. “It’s the same way I’m playing with the fridge. It’s very campy. … We all know this is a dorm room. No need to go for 100% immersion when you can have a little bit of fun.”

Scenic designer Andy Broomell, a lecturer at UCLA who teaches Neufeld in one of his drafting classes, heard about “Code Green.” “My first reaction was, ‘I would love to do it,’” he says, although he notes that’s not possible, citing the ethics of visiting students in their places of residence.

“I thought it was exciting, and more than anything, I love when a student will take on their own project and do something they’re passionate about,” Broomell says.

“Code Green” has evolved significantly since it began in a prior semester, and Neufeld, who graduates in June, is getting ready to move on. He’s got his second dorm escape room, for next semester, in the planning stages. He’s plotting something more lighthearted: a heist game involving squirrels.

Neufeld says the idea to build an escape room in his dorm came to him in the middle of the night, but also it was born out of that solo resident advisor life: “I got lonely,” he says.

“It was really one of those 2 a.m. ideas. I thought, ‘I have to do this.’ I can’t let this opportunity pass me by. Basically, this is a free room — yes, I’m working as a [resident advisor] to get this space — but if I were to rent a space after college, I think it would be a lot harder. That very night, it was 2 a.m., and I just started blocking it out,” Neufeld says.

UCLA student Tyler Neufeld wonders if there’s a future in murals that double as puzzles. Here he’s standing next to his “Don’t Bring Your Zombies to Work” piece, a series of painted challenges he created in a dormitory stairwell.

(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

It’s safe to say “Code Green” has helped Neufeld find his tribe. For L Siswanto, 21, an education major who assists Neufeld in running games, the room was an opportunity to explore a passion.

“I’m very interested in escape rooms,” Siswanto says. “I’ve only gone to a few IRL because they’re so expensive, but I had a phase where I obsessed with playing every escape room I could on [Apple’s] App Store. So when I saw there was a free escape room and they were looking for members to help out, I was like, ‘Wow. I love this type of stuff.’”

A total of 10 students are now contributing, either by spiffing up the production or maintaining the Instagram account. Duarte joined the project partly inspired by Neufeld’s conviction, impressed that he never talked himself out of something potentially illicit or left-of-center.

“When Tyler had the idea of building an escape room in his dorm, [I thought,] that’s crazy,” Duarte says. “But it’s really cool and exciting and inspiring. I want to surround myself with people who are interested in the same things that I am, and have the tenacity and confidence to just do it.”

“Code Green” helped UCLA student Tyler Neufeld, center, find his tribe. He now has about 10 people helping out on the escape room, including Michaela Duarte, left, and L Siswanto.

(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

There are times Neufeld admits he wishes he had his full dorm room back, such as when he has to crawl under hanging cardboard to reach his bed, but his entrepreneurial brain is also firing. He wonders if there’s a career possibility in creating puzzle murals, perhaps for bars or coffee shops. (He has one of those too, painted in a stairwell of a nearby dormitory and titled “Don’t Bring Your Zombies to Work.” It’s self-guided, meaning no need for a game master, and is a separate entity from “Code Green.”)

What’s more, building the escape room has ignited a passion for crafting environments, and he hopes for a career in the theme park industry. It’s also expanded his definition of theater.

“It’s basically a one-hour, one-act play,” Neufeld says. “But the set is all around you and the audience are your actors. It’s an extension of theater.”

Neufeld is in the process of fine-tuning a Zoom-based edition of “Code Green,” hoping the video conferencing service could help expose it to nonstudents. But despite the on-campus interest it’s garnered, living in a dorm as a resident advisor is keeping him humble. Neufeld laughs when asked what his neighbors think, revealing he tried to recruit his housing peers to come play via a post on a social media app. “I put it in the floor GroupMe, and it got zero likes,” he says.

Escaping the realities of modern life, it turns out, isn’t as easy as building your own escape.