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Perfect! Glad you're willing to hear me out. Firstly, the artstyle is lovely and the initial meeting situation with the merman is well done. It does show the proper level of danger-light- for an initial meeting and  sets up the situation of what to expect from the merman: desperate to escape to the point of reckless endangerment, will attack if near a person even if in a weakened state. Well done on immediately getting the player back into the merman scene by just skipping time. and the note of player accidently gong back tothe wrong living quarters out of habit *chef's kiss* because those small things are so important and I feel like sometimes they just get overlooked. 

Now, the meat of this comment: I thoroughly believe that the normalcy of a visual novel demo being a lot of clicking through exposition or npc dialouge shouldn't be normal. This is a game before it is a story. And I feel like visual novels really take a lot of leniency of the "novel" part and really don't need to. In regards to your demo specifically the length's problem is that it was very much the realm of "I'm just moving along a pre-determing route not playing yet and I know at this rate it's going to be a while before actually 'playing will ' happen" and I could pretty much tell it was just going to go that way for a long while and then it ended RIGHT when I started thinking "oh! good! I can actually start playing now and choosing how I interact with him!" I think a demo should include the gameplay itself, not just "here's the story". That's a prolouge to a story, not a demo and I feel a demo should be the gameplay not game backstory nor just game concept being explained. It took so long to reach interacting with the merman that I was just waiting and waiting and waiting for the exposition to stop since from the first minute or 2 I could tell the entire game was about the merman. 

Here's what I think a version of the demo in accordance to what I'm talking about could have been: quick meeting with the boss, jumping immediately to redhead giving warnings outside the place where first shift with mermans happens, then the first merman incident then time skip and immediately the feeding scene. In total everything before the "out the water" scene could be handled in max 5 minutes of gameplay. Yes, that's fast. That's the aim. I think demos should be about the crux of the game, not the beginning of what the exposition is. THe current dev style of visual novels and demos neglect to actually let the player play the game experience, just that the game they're playing will include: a merman who's once jumped out the cage and throws fish back at you opposed to like ... well, whatever the game is really about. Like, you see what I mean? I can't even give a proper explanation of what the main crux of the game is because I didn't get to see it. Yes, I understand - in theory - that it's about  a merman who doesn't trust you and is willing to attack you. But that's not a game, that's just the equivalent of what the redhead and boss warned the player about. Thus, the length problem: it's doesn't reach the level of what the game's going to be enough and thus makes the demo feel like it's just exposition and thus the "slideshow" feeling.