Thanks for your feedback!
I'm surprised you don't like the sound design all that much, but I'm convinced this is a result of poor mixing rather than the sounds themselves being uninteresting.
We apologize for the small resolution, there's a fullscreen button in the bottom right corner that will hopefully fully solve this issue for you. The small ball is not as hard to track in fullscreen, and we kind of couldn't make the ball any larger, it needs to be small for it to pop several bubbles at once with ease. The game would have been much slower and tedious if the ball was larger.
I completely agree with the false alarm critique, we should have definitely tried to find a solution for this, and it's my fault for not communicating it with the team.
The gameplay is heavily inspired by the games Arkanoid and Breakout, which are extremely known arcade games, so we didn't feel the need to tutorialize anything about the power-ups. However, I can see how some aspects of the gameplay can be unintuitive.