First of all, I really enjoyed this game and I regret that it took me almost 7 years to finally fully play it.

Prologue:

The Evil Within is a quite unique story-driven game with a great atmosphere, fun gameplay, mostly good enemy design, and a killer soundtrack.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

The game starts off as a kind of a stealth/3rd person shooter hybrid which was a great choice in my opinion. It keeps the beat of mixing horror with action up until Chapter 6. That's where I noticed that the game is slowly changing focus. It was no longer really focused on horror but rather on full-on action. Even the whole tone of the game changed. Sadly in the worst possible way and that's by making the whole chapter take place during the day. Luckily I was pleasantly surprised that the very next chapter went back to the horror roots and even stronger than before. Everything went well for a while up until suddenly a tragedy strikes, Chapters 11 and 12. Those two chapters were by far the worst time I had while playing the game. They threw away everything that made the game unique and transformed it into a boring generic 3rd person shooter. I mean sure there were some good highlights but the bad stuff was simply too overwhelming. It also didn't help that they had the worst boss fight in the whole game which was a shame since it had a great design. After those travesties called chapters the game finally fully tapped into a more surreal experience which was once again a great choice. Too bad it only lasted for 3 chapters since the game has 15. The ending was also pretty good I only didn't like the fact that it was too open and kinda sequel baiting.

Conclusion:

While The Evil Within is overall a great game it sometimes struggled to find its own identity. It also didn't help that some chapters felt like they were just a cheap filler to get more playtime out of players. Bosses were mostly alright, with really only one being meh and one being an absolute bomb. The ending was also not too bad but a bit too open for my taste.