“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 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 Neufeld has been running the free “Code Green” escape room for fellow students and their friends while juggling 22 units, his role as a resident adviser and a part-time job as an office assistant. On a recent Sunday, he hosted three 60-minute games.

When I visit one 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 adviser 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.

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 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.”

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 adviser 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 adviser) 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.

It’s safe to say “Code Green” has helped Neufeld find his tribe. 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.”

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.

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.”