I haven't yet read through the entirety of Ravenloft: Horrors Within, the 5.5 update to the Ravenloft setting, but I've gotten the broad gist of it, and figured I'd give these initial impressions before I go deep on things like subclasses, monsters, and other elements.
First things first: Is this a rehash of Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft (as I've often said, my favorite 5E sourcebook). The answer is... a little. There's certainly lots of new stuff and some things that Van Richten's was sorely lacking (Darklord statblocks) but there's also a fair amount of overlap between the books.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing: if you don't have Van Richten's, Horrors Within will give you all you need to know what is going on in Ravenloft as a setting, and allow you to run a campaign set there. There is significant overlap - most of the featured domains were also in Van Richten's (though there are a few new ones).
Character options have been revised a bit - some have obvious and significant changes (I need to do a closer reading, but I think College of Spirits Bards are a lot better now) while others maybe could have used a little more thorough redesign (Phantom Rogues still don't get to earn more soul trinkets in combat until level 9).
We have some revised subclasses (including both from Van Richten's - at first glance, the Undead Warlock is mostly just updated to the way patrons work in 5.5, giving them all their patron spells) as well as the new Reanimator Artificer and Hollow Warden Ranger (the latter of which might be the best Ranger subclass now).
The three "Gothic Lineages" from Van Richten's were updated and presented as simply independent species (sadly this means that they don't get bonus skills anymore - indeed, I think this is broadly a nerf) along with the Lupin, which is basically a botched werewolf who is stuck in their hybrid form at all times.
Dark Gifts have been redesigned to function as a replacement for Origin Feats. Each gives you something a little more powerful than a typical Origin Feat (except Touch of Death, which I believe is just strictly worse than something like Magic Initiate). I actually think this is a pretty elegant solution. Indeed, the concept of a Dark Gift is actually very similar to a kind of "backstory-defining" origin feat. I like this design choice.
In terms of monsters, either all or at least the vast majority of the monsters from Van Richten's have been updated here. Sadly, in my opinion, the Loup-Garou has, like its lesser werewolf cousins in the Monster Manual, lost any particular need to be attacked with silver - the horror is focused more on their infectiousness than their indestructibility.
The real highlight here, though, is that each featured Darklord now has its own unique statblock. Strahd's is, admittedly, not too distinct from the Monster Manual Vampire (just with a higher CR and some spellcasting) but everyone from Saidra D'Honaire to Cthulhu (yeah, see below) has got a legendary stat block with character-appropriate abilities. If there was one big issue I had with Van Richten's, it was the kind of arbitrary assignment of low-CR stat blocks to major villains.
Also, for those who like to throw some Cthulhu mythos into your games, not only do you have the Big Green Guy from R'lyeh himself, but also a number of iconic Lovecraft monsters: Elder Things, Yithians, Shoggoths, Mi-Go, and Gugs, and all of which are pretty high CR (I think the lowest are the Mi-Go, which are CR 9). So, even if you're not doing Ravenloft, if you want some scary alien aberrations to challenge a high-level party, there's some good stuff here.
Taking a similar approach to other 5.5 releases, the book presents simplified adventures that you could actually imagine finishing in a session or two. Each domain has at least one adventure with a suggested level range, some maps, and some encounters, with a reasonable hook and themes that tie into the domain. For example, in Borca, there's an adventure in which a pair of nobles who have accidentally stolen from Ivana Boritsi try to fake their deaths and frame the party for their murders. The party then has to track them down to clear their names and retrieve the unique plant that they stole, only for them to encounter Waxworth copies of the nobles (one of the new monsters) and finally discover that the two have been absorbed into the plant, which is now a Violet Fungus Necrohulk.
I will go in deep on character options, particularly subclasses, once I've had time to read through the rest of the book.
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