Horizontal Shmup Wing Of The Asteria Sounds Like The Spiritual Successor To Namco's Phelios

Namco is famous for a great many amazing games from the '80s and '90s, including Pac-Man, Xevious, Galaga, Splatterhouse and Mappy. One of the company's lesser-known hits is 1989's Phelios, which took some of the most famous tropes from Greek myths and legends and placed them in a vertically-scrolling blaster. It was later ported to the Genesis / Mega Drive and recently turned up on the Namco collection for the Evercade handheld.

Why are we telling you all of this? Well, Japanese studio PiXEL has just announced Wing of the Asteria (Asteria no Tsubasa in Japan), a horizontally-scrolling shooter which seems to be thematically very similar to Namco's title – heck, it will even feature the audio talents of Yoshinori "Kawagen" Kawamoto of the Bandai Namco Studios Sound Team, who worked on Phelios and Burning Force, another Namco title from the same period.

You can check out concept art for Artemis, Orion and the mid-boss Griffon below.

Blessed with character design and concept art by Shuzilow.HA (Twin Bee series, Gaiapolis), Wing of the Asteria sees players take control of Artemis, Goddess of the Moon. She wishes to restore the life of her lover Orion, and – like Apollo in the aforementioned Phelios, rides the legendary horse Pegasus.

Wing of the Asteria will launch on Switch in Japan sometime next year.