Ritual, the Texan developer recently acquired by Mumbo Jumbo, have confirmed what we'd already suspected: that SiN: Episodes is on-hold indefinitely. The distributed first-episode, Emergence, apparently failed to sell the hot-cakes desired, sparking not only last week's take-over, but a suspension of the series as a whole.

Richard Gray (Levelord of the old .plan days) made the announcement on community site Ritualistic, stating: "The first episode did well, but not good enough to completely self-fund the second episode," adding: "We did continue with Episode 2, but we had to stop a few months ago due to a funding problem."

As Mumbo Jumbo took over at the firm, boss Mark Cottam revealed that games would no longer be a focus for the merged company. Instead, Ritual will move towards gaming a la Mumbo Jumbo.

"What we plan to do right now, both Ritual and MumboJumbo, is establish ourselves in the casual gaming market with strong new franchises and then return to SiN at a later date," Gray explained. "We love SiN, make no mistake, and we definitely want to return to it."

"I'm not going to give any specific dates, but our plans are to finish more than a few games this year," he concluded. "Expect to see the Ritual logo on your PC, PS3, Wii, Xbox, console downloads... everywhere!"

By Luke Guttridge