The blank surface of a college dormitory leads many college students to personalize its walls so they feel like the room is a reflection of them. Unlike most people’s mildly creative dorm decorations, like having a musician’s poster or witty slogan on the wall, fourth-year theater student Tyler Neufeld’s creative overcharge made his decorations “almost” inescapable. In fact, it became an escape room called Code Green, though it has, as of Dec. 6, 2024, been taken down due to UCLA policy.
“I wanted to connect with my own roots a little more because I’d already built an escape room in high school and I really liked making clues and scavenger hunts and stuff with my siblings,” said Neufeld. “It was less about having a specific idea with the thought ‘Oh I’m going to build this exact escape room’ and more ‘I’m going to build an escape room because this a good fit for the skills that I’ve already developed.’”
Although Neufeld had built an escape room previously, much of the skills he employed to construct Code Green were developed from his work in theater.
“I think [an escape room] is a performance given from both the game master and any actors if there are any in the room. For Code Green, it was just one game master playing multiple characters with puppets. But you have to channel theater knowledge, like acting and improv to be able to host that for people. Then you can even think of it like the players are actors as well, and they’re just improving. It’s a little bit of a stretch to say that the players are actors, but I do kind of think of it that way as well,” Neufeld said.
He does hint at plans to work in an escape room or immersive experience design in the future, but he has quite a strong foundation in theater, having worked on numerous projects and several short films. He even created a feature-length film, a testament to his ability to bring ideas to life. While Neufeld has completed many creative projects, those familiar with his work praise his attention to quality.
“I was part of a project [with Neufeld] called ‘Before the Sky was Red,’” said UCLA alum and close friend of Neufeld, Al Hiciano De Góngora. “It was really cool to be able to give a pitch and for Tyler [Neufeld] and Payton combined to be able to take that idea and inspiration and run with it. I’ve always trusted Tyler a lot as an artist, so it felt really good as someone involved to be able to say, this is kind of what I’m thinking, and then to be able to just trust whatever direction he takes it in, it’s going to turn into something.”
From a young age, theater appealed to Neufeld’s sense of wonder.
“The very first theater show I saw when I was like five or six years old, just kind of had a bit of magic for me,” said Neufeld. “I saw there was a big dragon puppet that unfurled at the end of ‘Sleeping Beauty.’ Just seeing the way that all of my friends that were in it were transformed truly by the costumes into little animals and princesses. It all felt so real at the same time while knowing that it was so fake and I just wanted to know, how did they do that?”
Fourth-year theater student Tyler Neufeld explains the rules of his escape room. Photographed by Khaled Al Duwaikat/BruinLife
Neufeld was quite particular in the set design of his escape room and leveraged recycled and reclaimed materials for the process. Similarly, he had clear intent for his props and was fully immersed in the building process of the escape room.
“[Building] it was extremely time-consuming,” said Neufeld. “I don’t know the exact number of hours because I didn’t want to treat it like a job, where I have to clock myself in and out but [it took] at least a few hundred hours and even [another] few hundred hours over the summer, particularly for creating the zoom playable version since I had a bunch of photos that I needed to touch up.”
The time commitment of the escape room loomed large in his life though, especially as he had to balance it with the demands of being a college student.
“It was definitely a pretty extreme thing to account for, particularly with the games, because I’d have to look at my schedule a few weeks out and hold a spot open for booking,” said Neufeld. “There would usually come a point though where I’m like, ‘Oh, I hope no one books this because I actually have to do homework right now.’”
While Neufeld was initially frustrated by the difficulty of getting people to come to his dorm room escape room, building a social media presence through the Instagram account @dorm.scapes really helped scale his project and more people felt comfortable visiting. While only the Zoom version of the escape room is available now, he is still proud of his accomplishment.
“I’m taking it pretty well,” said Neufeld. Of the escape room being taken down, he said “It’s something I knew was a very real possibility from the very beginning and I think it is pretty much an accomplishment that we were even able to go as long as we did without it being taken down.”
