Huh, strange indeed. I'd like to note that the black screen with the loading text is normal, that's part of the game, but directly after that an animation runs. I'm guessing there might be something with how your PC handles those animations.

Try running it outside of Steam, it'll be located in located in [Steam Root]/steamapps/common/worldofgoo (or something similar). If possible, it might also help if you tell us what OS you're using, maybe your graphics card too.

Hello, RolanDecoy, and welcome to GooFans!

As this is a World of Goo fan site, please don't say "your minimum specifications", as we didn't make them. We'll try to help if possible, but if all our advice fails, there's ultimately nothing we can do.

If launching outside of Steam doesn't work, my gut feel would be that there's some major, major problems with your computer, but if other games run fine, maybe not. The possibilities that immediately come to mind are:

1. Glitched graphics drivers. I'm not sure how many games you play regularly, but it could be that there's a bug in one of your drivers that glitches something internally in your OS kernel. Generally, I would think this would make your computer BSOD, but it may also shut your computer off abruptly. It's possible. In any case, make sure you're using the latest version of your graphics drivers, so at least all known bugs are fixed.

2. Corrupted RAM. Our family had a fairly similar problem with one of our computers not too long ago. The computer would just randomly reboot for apparently no reason at all. It could be that World of Goo is an edge case that causes the corrupted memory to surface, but it'd be fairly unlikely in my opinion for World of Goo to always crash it, and nothing else to crash it. If you want to test this, however, you can always use a memory diagnostic tool like memtest86 (Use the free download rather than paying for a CD - iirc there's also a way to use it off a USB thumbdrive rather than burning an ISO to a CD) to see if your computer has memory trouble. Then you'd have to replace your PC's RAM, processor, motherboard, whatever, depending on where memory errors there are. Of course, even running memtest86 is fairly complicated, and requires a good amount of technical know-how, not to mention that replacing RAM isn't for the faint of heart, but as I said, it's just a possibility.

3. I would personally believe that it wouldn't be a virus, since any halfway intelligent virus creator would want your computer to stay up and online as much as possible so the virus can spread, but running a full system scan with an antivirus program (Avast! is my personal preference) wouldn't be a bad idea either. (Of course, if you're on Mac, this generally shouldn't be an issue)

This is all probably TMI to an insane degree, so try puggsoy's suggestion first, tell us your computer's OS and that sort of thing, and we'll go from there.

MOM

Same advice as puggsoy. If using steam, odds are, that's what's causing issues. If running it without steam fails, there might be an issue with your graphics driver, try to install/reinstall it. And if that fails and you really want to play World of Goo, you could try formatting your OS drive and reinstalling. Anyway, I generally try to avoid DRM when I can (e.g. World of Goo), it only causes more problems really.

I would NOT recommend formatting your hard drive. This doesn't sound like a hard disk problem to me. If you're on XP, you can try defragmenting the drive (Vista and 7 do this automatically). But formatting a hard disk just so you can play a game would be making a mountain out of a molehill. And likely wouldn't solve anything.