blundering through aquaria

As I may have mentioned earlier, I am a walkthrough kind of girl. I used to buy strategy guides. I have no shame about looking things up. If the game is hard and I am not having fun thwapping it, I have no problem with playing straight through the game from the walkthrough without even trying it alone. (That said, I prefer walkthroughs written in a way that following their instructions also teaches you how to play and shows you where the hints were.)

However, I haven't yet sought help on Aquaria since the demo. I die a lot, and it really pisses me off, and I have found a few things that I have no clue what to do with, but I haven't run out of places to go and things to try. And I can 'read the gamestyle' well enough to often have some clue whether I *should* be able to get past an obstacle or not. Some stuff seems clearly to be waiting for me to gain extra powers and come back later. But I solved a puzzle I didn't completely know was there simply by getting the idea that I was meant to be able to go there at this stage, so there must be a way to do it, so what tools do I have? Aha!

Reached a boss monster, got killed by it, but as far as I know I had figured out the strategy, just gotten tired and failed to pull it off on my first try. So I'm not looking for help on her yet either.

I do get really tired of that auto-zoom-in thing though. For one, it bugs me when I'm pausing to look for monsters and the scope is trying to hide them from me (although maybe that's the point? Keep swimming or die!). For another, after playing the game, I find that looking at the computer screen tends to make me dizzy, as I feel like the computer is trying to zoom in and out at me...

EDIT: Since beating that boss failed to give me any idea of what to do next, I did have to start searching for hints at that point. Foo. Things I looked up: what the metal balls are for, where to find fish form, which I already knew existed because of food items.