Oh bleah - it won't load the islands on my computer ... it shows a black background to the title screen and it never gets out of the "take a stroll" screen when I go to an island. It just plays an occasional water-lapping-on-beach noise. :(
Ahh yeah Avast can be really weird sometimes…Maybe I’ll stumble upon what’s causing this, if you can I’d love to have some screenshots and maybe log files, if you’d like to send them to me over on Twitter!
Long-belated update: I think my 2010 laptop just did not have a modern enough graphics card to run it. I recently upgraded to - *checks notes* - a 2015 computer with a budget 2013 graphics card, and now the game runs wonderfully.