Ha, yeah, I am happy with my progression, I don't plan to look at hints. I sorted out the chess pieces (or at least one level of them, IDK if there is something additional planned in the future but I made it to the place where you can use them to solve one puzzle).

I have a notebook which I'm taking notes on. It is 100% essential, I can't imagine making progress in the game without it. I'm also being very very liberal with screenshots (good for taking a look at something that I don't really understand and putting it on the back burner for later digging into). I think I have a couple hundred screenshots of various things at this point which I commonly go back and reference, a lot of times I'll have a screenshot on one monitor while I'm playing the game on the second monitor.