Here's my review (1st draft, need to sleep so didn't re-read for typos/expect many):
Finished the game at 17.5 hours and 104 deaths on survival. It's a good game, but one I would hesitantly recommend as it's very much only for a certain audience with a very decent tolerance for frustrating parts. A lot of the chapters were fine, but some not so much.
One thing I can say without hesitation is that imo this is the best looking game of 2014. It may not be pushing crazy tech, but as is shown year after year in the game industry, Japan knows its stuff when it comes to art design. Just as Team Silent created the most striking visuals with Silent Hill, Naoki Katakai just does an amazing job with TEW. The lighting, the effects, the rain, even the letterboxing works. It feels like this perfect mindfuck gritty noir psychological detective horror tale; which is exactly what it is! So the visuals just portray the game absolutely perfect.
Music is pretty good as well, though as much as I like Fukuda, I kind of wish Mikami got Yamaoka to go full Silent Hill in atmosphere
The save room music selection is beautiful though.
The level design is the best this year and one of the worst. The game is incredible for an AAA game in that it's super long and constantly has variety in locations, enemies, bosses, mixing up action & stealth, adventure in a variety of scenarios. TEW reminds me heavily of RE4 in this aspect as RE4 was an impressively long and varied game and TEW is very much the spiritual successor. It's actually nice that such a lengthy game can keep introducing ideas and only use them a few times because it has so much to use. Keeps it fresh and always interesting and never feeling repetitive. On the down side, there's lots of bad player signaling, too many scripted sequences of trial & error, and a lot of cheap deaths at parts which all detract in the moments from the overall fantastic large-length adventure that Tango have created.
Story is solid and provides proper psychological draping. It's a mess, but told in a way that's supposed to be a jumbled mess. Yes, none of the characters are anything more than wooden, but that's not really out of place for the horror genre, and especially Japanese horror. It's more about the story itself and not the characters. You aren't supposed to need to get attached to Sebastian because it's more interesting just trying to figure out what's going on than his particular tale.
Gameplay is good. Combat has good feedback, weapons are fun to use (bow is great!) challenge in combat is tough but fair, though the game really should give some i-frames for canned animations like lighting a match or stealth killing an enemy. Good enemy variety and the few actual boss fights that are actually combat fights are fun. Upgrade system is fine and New Game+ is always a great addition.
Overall The Evil Within really feels like the game you would expect the guy who made Resident Evil 4 to make after RE4, a similar genre game but taken in new directions to make it feel unique and not just derivative. It has a lot of the good parts of RE4's design: Great combat, Varied level design, Good atmosphere. But then brings in survival design from games like Dark Souls where you're encourage to play slowly and creep through the world with your eyes open at all times, where instant death is around every corner and combines it with the psychological story and darker horror of Silent Hill.
The downside though is that it just doesn't nail what it takes from all these games just right. The combat is a bit janky and a little sluggish and not as fun as RE4 (and TEW lacks any pure combat Mercenaries type modes), the survival careful trap and encounter design is off just enough that it can often be cheap and at times frustrating instead of the fun keep-your-eyes-open challenge that the Souls games bring and the story just doesn't come together as much as a good Silent Hill type psychological horror tale would do. At times it seems like it's trying to do too much and exploding from the attempt to contain it all.
So what you end up with is a would-be-masterpiece that's flawed in just about every aspect and at least the first time around, requires patience and tolerance for flawed bits that usually feel more of a "ran out of time" jank than necessarily bad game design. It's tough to really put a number to a game like this because you really want to love it, but objectively it's got flaws spilling out everywhere.
But one thing is for sure, is that it's at least a good game. And for a niche genre like this, it's never bad having an ambitious good game; even if you're gonna get stabbed a few times by its thorns.
