I'm glad you made this- it was a great chance to do some brain work and crack a puzzle open! I enjoyed trying to figure things out without much guidance. It's a nice change from being led through everything. Sometimes you want to feel proud because you figured it out, you know?
For things like this, I find it works best to take a trial-and-error approach to determine each apparent rule one at a time, then test if I got it right and determine if there are more apparent rules. I focus on finding the rules first, and only attempt to beat the game once I'm certain I've found the essentials. I find it's hard or impossible to beat a game when you don't know the rules you need to play by, and working them out allowed me to play by skill instead of luck (though luck remains a factor here for obvious reasons).
The downside is I may have also followed a rule or two that didn't actually exist because coincidence led me to think an input and output were correlated, but for the most part this approach did the job and helped tide frustration. Little bits of progress can make a big difference in how long I can tolerate something.