Thanks for the (very spoilery) feedback. I'm glad you enjoyed the game.
The game is fairly linear until you've finished the tutorial. Once you leave the town, the game opens up and you can do lots of things in any order. This part of the game is essentially an information gathering exercise and you can gather that information in any order. You may have found some information earlier than expected, but that doesn't matter. You still need to find all the information and work out what to do with it, which you apparently did in the long run.