People like to call Shinji Mikami the master of survival horror, but honestly he really just isn't that good at the horror part. Subtlety is a term that just absolutely escapes him.
I really wanted to love this game, but The Evil Within is so disappointingly bland and uninspired the only part that sticks out is the design of one monster in the game (Reborn Laura). It's basically RE 4 ,but without the unintentional/intentional B-Movie camp that went hand in hand with over the top violence that made that game work. The protagonist couldn't get any more generic (being voiced by Anson Mount is cool though), actually you can say the same for every character. The plot tries to do quite a bit of things ,but all feels pointless in the end.
Generic and shallow are the defining terms for this whole game. It's a quilt patchwork of all these different concepts and imagery that never finds enough focus to make it all work to their full potential. Instead, everything stays at the shallow end of the pool. I tried to give it another go ,and well, I can say it's the worst horror game of 2014. I'll go happily get my hands on a copy of Alien:Isolation and Outlast/Outlast:Whistleblower instead. Maybe even some freeware horror online to cleanse my pallet.