We've made some changes to hopefully avoid false positives from antivirus software.
If you download the current release on itch, it may work better for you. Try the backup-run.cmd script in the event that your antivirus still removes the exe files.
Yeah, idk. I tried to whitelist and run the game anyway, and I'm 99% sure there was actually a trojan. My task manager stopped working, it wouldn't open up. The unzipped game folder refused to be deleted, even after asking for admin consent (however the request didn't seem to come from Microsoft, but from "unknown"). My PC started going slow. I immediately ran Kaspersky again, and did 2 reboots.
For reference, the name of the malware detected is called "UDS:Exploit.Win32.UAC", and it was found both in the game .EXE file, and the "Updater.EXE" file.
Maybe you should check your own game files with the antivirus, your PC might have a virus that automatically put itself inside the game files.
My files seem to be fine so far. I wonder if, maybe, my own PC was the cause of this, idk. Maybe a trojan was already hidden in my PC before, and then sneakily put itself in your game when I downloaded it; I have no idea.
For the record though, I would love to play this game, I think the presentation looked absolutely gorgeous and lovely, and having played Anubis & TBB, and loved that to BITS (and also had zero issues with it), I can say I'm very excited about this. I'm sure this is just some weird issue that my PC brought up because of whatever reason. I wish you the best of luck!
We uploaded another new version today to alleviate additional false positives from antivirus software. I suggest completely removing the game folder and any zip files you downloaded before, then redownloading the game from itch.
In the event that your antivirus does still flag the game executable, you can delete the executable (or allow your AV software to delete it) and use the backup-run script included with the game to start it instead.