While I'd love for this approach to work, it's not implemented at this time. You'll need APOC for setting properties dynamically.
One exception is when you have a map of parameters to update (not increment, update to the value exactly). If you set a map parameter where the key(s) are the properties to update, after filtering to the nodes to update you can use SET p += $updatedProperties and they will overwrite just the properties contained in the map.
The trick then is to ensure that you can set the right keys into the map for the properties you want to update. You can't do that with Cypher (you can with APOC), so you'd have to construct that map in your code and pass it as a parameter to your query.