Hey! Long time no speak!
I'm somewhat of a stickler when it comes to AV software - I've tried numerous ones and the best one I've found is Kaspersky. Out of testing it pretty much detected everything thrown at it - including the all new Python based intrusions that we're now starting to see.
I did ditch Avast also because it kept detecting something as "malicious" when it was a .dll that came packaged with a game (retail) from like 2002, so I wasn't really too convinced it knew what it was really looking for.
If you really want a good solution without buying extra software - it's going to be to actually set up a VM and use that to unpack titles and see if they do anything suspicious. Scan it in there and check it all over before anything else. I do this whenever I download from an unknown host or supplier. If something suspicious shows up, kill the VM and restart - no harm done, only a few minutes of time lost.
If you're running Windows - it actually has the ability to install VM's right in the OS itself. "Hyper-V Manager" & "Hyper-V Quick Create" allow you to pretty much do everything you need.
Have not tried Kaspersky. I tend to avoid the Old-School ones as they just haven't kept up with the times. Like Norton AV or McAfee. Great AVs in the 90s and early 2000s, but not so much anymore.
Well I've yet to encounter a python-based intrusion, mostly because I run AdBlockPlus everywhere. The last three major viruses that infected my machine, came from auto-playing video ads; two from YouTube and one from NexusMods, surprisingly. Thing is these services use unencrypted ads (to save on bandwidth and load times), which don't have the virus, but a virus maker could hack their virus into it as its not encrypted.
Avast does seem to not like .dlls, in general. All the games it had issues with had .dlls. Its a decent AV if you want something free and aren't playing many video games or don't care about whitelisting the ones that do present issues.
How goes Call of Beyond? Was a bit disappointed that V0.6 didn't have any GhostFrontier to do (even if it was janky in V0.5)