Thanks for playing Tim, and for your thoughtful feedback!
Decided to go with a color palette from colorhunt.co this time for the visuals and I'm glad I did. I'm not an artist by any shot, so having something pre-curated was helpful. I was lucky to find open license audio assets that matched the art style and theme of the game.
You're absolutely right about the salience of the pellets. The "instructions" "eat-me" and "avoid-me" were shown on the main menu, but only briefly if the user clicked play game straight away. Could have been a visual indicator at game start to show it, since the initial pellets were statically spawned.
Thank you for your kind words!