Glad to hear you enjoyed the game!
It's kind of wild how much impact even simple sfx can make. They add so much clarity that something is happening even if you can't see or understand exactly what.
You're not the first person to complain about the background corruption (it's a texture split into tiles that I sort of 'painted' over the terrain tile layer), and I can see I didn't go far enough with darkening and desaturating it to make it clear even with the enemy bullets outlined in white, so that's already planned to be reworked.