Metroid Prime 4: Beyond's Ice Belt is one of the series' best moments

Nearly 25 years ago, the original Metroid Prime set the modern standard for wintry video game biomes with Phendrana Drifts. The icy level plays a key part in Samus’ adventure, not just housing handy upgrades but also important story tidbits. It’s a bit of a graveyard for the dead alien race that once inhabited Tallon IV, the planet where Metroid Prime takes place. With its unforgettable vistas and some of the best music in video game history, Phendrana Drifts is a gold standard that even the Metroid series itself has struggled to live up to. That was, until Metroid Prime 4: Beyond.

You can levy a lot of criticisms against Samus’ most recent adventure: Sylux is an underwhelming villain, the open-world desert hub is bland, and Myles MacKenzie sure likes to yap. But where Metroid Prime 4 delivers is in its excellent biome design. From the jungles of Fury Green to the factory lines of Volt Forge, it features some of the series’ best environments since the first Metroid Prime game. That’s most apparent in Ice Belt, a Metroid biome that finally stands shoulder to shoulder with Phendrana Drifts.

When you first enter the blandly named Ice Belt, it seems like you’re in for a fairly standard snow level. Samus walks through a wintry landscape, blasting bugs and melting ice walls before she’s jumped by a pack of wolves. That’s only a short warm-up to the real attraction in Ice Belt: an abandoned laboratory that belonged to the planet’s now-dead alien race, the Lamorn. What exactly happened there? That’s what Samus has to find out in a dungeon that both follows the conventions of icy Metroid levels and totally shatters them.

Ice Belt isn’t just your average winter level; it’s a self-contained horror movie. Samus finds herself in a creepy biolab full of frozen corpses in test tubes. Naturally, creatures start to break from containment as she explores, making for a few good jump scares along the way. There’s narrative heft to the moment too, as it’s the “all hope is lost” point of the story where Samus uncovers how the Lamorn inadvertently accelerated their own extinction. It’s the one part of Metroid Prime 4 that truly delivers the sense of dread and isolation that the Metroid series built its name on.

Like most of the biomes in Viewros, the planet where Metroid Prime 4 takes place, Ice Belt’s strength lies in how it subverts elemental tropes that have been core to video games for decades. How many games have you played that bounce you between a grass area, a fire zone, an ice world, and some kind of electrical biome? (Think something like Donkey Kong Bananza with its scattershot layers.) Developer Retro Studios follows that formula, but it avoids creating an incoherent world by grounding each environment in narrative. Volt Forge is an electrified area because it’s a factory that needs to be powered by constant storms on one edge of Viewros. The weather is part of the story, explaining how the Lamorn were able to become a technologically advanced race.

That same storytelling is present in Ice Belt. We’re not just exploring a snowy level because that’s where a video game is supposed to go next. The lab was intentionally abandoned and frozen over for a reason. Even before you know why, you get the sense that the Lamorn were trying to bury secrets here. The environment itself is foreboding. In that sense, Ice Belt is a clear descendant of Phendrana Drifts. That level pulled off the same trick, telling the tragedy of the Chozo race with frozen monuments and vicious ghosts. Both biomes are haunted houses.

There’s a good reason that kind of design fits so well in Metroid. After all, the series was influenced by one of the horror greats: Alien. Series co-creator Yoshio Sakamoto has never hidden the fact that Metroid was originally inspired by Ridley Scott’s classic monster movie. (I mean, Ridley is right there.) H.R. Giger’s art guided the game’s look, and there are shades of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Samus. The series has had plenty of parallels and nods to Alien, but Ice Belt makes the influence clearer than ever. Ice Belt’s abandoned lab doesn’t feel all too distant from the USCSS Nostromo.

Metroid Prime 4 is a mess, but Ice Belt is the one biome that brings it partway into focus. It makes it clear that the game is trying to reach back to the series’ cinematic roots. The talkative characters feel like they’re meant to recreate the squad dynamics in Alien, Sylux stalks Samus around Viewros like the Xenomorph, and there’s certainly a lot of Giger to be found in some yonic design choices. It doesn’t work from start to finish, but Ice Belt makes for a great little horror movie on its own. If Metroid Prime 5 ever gets a green light, that’s the ice-cold moment it can build on.