Cypress Inheritance: The Beginning Reviews

$10 game at best.

oculus rift support mid 2014 nearly 2016 payed money off steam for that reason

Avoid. Bad textures, confusing and horrible gameplay, and extremely bad performance

Seriously, no-one seems to know what the developer is up to except the developer. They seem to operate in their own fantasy world and forget there are customers out in the real world wondering what they paid for. The promises seem empty, based upon the piss-poor effort in communication. Steer clear as this is as dead as a Dodo and to be honest you are more likely to see a live Dodo then this game properly finished. You have been warned.

I am deal chaser and I like to play games that go off the beaten path. When I saw this game at sale, it caught my eye and seemed to have the elements I was looking for: nice graphics, exploration, a mysterious island, interesting gameplay (cause&effect). The game delivered on what I was expecting on the graphics part and exploration. Also, the island sure is mysterious and a deserted place only populated by those knights robots. For me, the game began on a high note with the briefing at the mansion and the scene at the port. Only enough information to get to the next place. I was intrigued. I arrived at the island and it was very nice, but then some execution problems started to pop up. I was faced with a bug that prevented me from continuing the game or even start a new game. Every time I tried to get to the island, I was kicked out of it and the game ended. I managed to get around it, but it was a frustrating introduction. Some other problems happened and also other good surprises that I try to summarize below. Pros: - Nice graphics - Nice atmosphere - Nice voice acting - Ok CGI - This game has some thing very nice and kind of rare that I always look for in games in: persistency, especially in Chapter I. If you drop an item, it will stay there. Forever. The ATVs have their position, fuel, flat tire persistent. If you leave an ATV in the back of beyond in the island, it will stay there. Your health, stamina is persistent. They only regenerate when you sleep/drink/eat. If you get a stun gun from a dispenser, it will never respawn. If you use it, then for this play through is gone. In this time that, for many games, even the health auto regenerates and every enemy you kill disappears within seconds, this is a welcome change. - Nice change of pace in the VR Desert (if you overcome the frustrating beginning). - Nice change of pace for chapters II and III. Almost different games. - Some vistas in chapter II and III are beautiful. - In chapter I, some times I saw one of those parked ships flying. Nice touch! - In chapter II, the room with all the old movies/cartoons. Wow! Another nice touch! Cons: - You know the persistency I mentioned above? Well, this can be a problem when encountering bugs. On Chapter II, I was stuck in terrain. Could not by any means get out. So I exited the game and entered again. I respawned at the exactly same stuck spot... - The map in Chapter I cannot be scrolled. - No transitions. If you get caught, got shot, fall from somewhere, the screen blinks and you go back to the respawn point. There is no animation, no sound. - The beginning of the VR desert, if you stay put and allow the knights to come at you, is very frustrating since the respawn point is very near where the nights already are. You enter an unnerving cycle of dying/respawning. - Many bugs that I got stuck in terrain. Especially if you try to find every game item... - Could not use only the controller. To start a new game or continue, I could only do that via mouse. - Found some bugs trying to collect all chapter I assets. After getting 4 of them and knowing which vault the fifth was supposed to be, I kept getting the same assets I already had. Overall, I had an enjoyable experience, but ultimately I was expecting a bit more of it. Some bugs almost ruined the experience for me so I feel more polish would greatly help this game.

This was not a good game, sorry. It is boring, pedantic and predictable with poor graphics, controls that can't be reconfigured, almost no gameplay instructions that make sense...I could go on. Combine that with the inability to jump or manuver past up/down/right/left, and you have a huge yawner. On top of that, for some reason if you don't skip the beginning part of the game...the story, there is a better than fifty fifty chance you will see the island blown up and get the credits rolling through the screen. Credits mind you, you must CNTRL, ALT, DEL to skip as ESC won't get you out. Got to get those accolades in folks. I know this is a rather harsh critique and I don't usually post them but with all the hype about this game, you would have thought it was something special, something worth paying for. It wasn't until I bought and paid for it...money I can't get back for this piece of cr*p, that I found out just how bad it really is. The reason for the criticism is to hopefully keep someone else from making the same mistake. Buy Styx with your money, buy Thief, Dishonored if you want stealth, heck, buy Dark Messiah of Might and Magic...a fairly challenging D and D for a challenge with about the same level of graphics but some interesting gameplay, but please, don't invest your hard earned dollars in Cypress Inheritance. This beginning should also be it's end.

It's crash prone (four in the very tiny amout of play time I bothered with), has limited customizing options (including a tiny range of resolutions and no way to alter graphical quality), and the voice acting makes me wish I'd been born deaf. It isn't just that I don't recommend it, I actively recommend against it.

UPDATE 7/25 - With all the latest patches you can now get into vaults but all undergound vaults say "Vault Empty". Two topside vaults have hard drives in them but if you can pick them up they don't register in your inventory that you took them or you may even not be able to pick them up even if they are right in front of you. Game is still impossible to complete in the current state. UPDATE - 6/30 I have unlocked two topside vaults with nothing to take out of them. I have also unlocked 2 of the 5 underground vaults. There is a locked box in those vaults but even with the 5 outpost codes and the 5 keys the boxes will not unlock. The current state of the game=Impossible to finish game until bug is fixed. UPDATE- Just days after reporting my negative review, a 1 GB patch has come out. Most of the ATV issues are FIXED!!! When you save the game and reload your ATV now doesn't disappear. The ATV doesn't get stuck as bad as it did. In 2 places I managed to get it stuck but I was able to push the ATV out of the bad situation AND, the big one so far, there's ATV stations! Now you can access multiple ATVs instead of the very first one in the game!! I will explore more to see what else has been updated. Review will be modified later to reflect this. "Hopeful" would be the best review I could give for Cypress Inheritance: The Beginning. I played the game originally after the first iteration for a brief time. That was 10 years ago! Most gamers know by now it wasn't good. I put it on the burner and hoped after time it may get better. The website was touting all these meta connections to the game with books, games, extensions, etc. I had hoped with some time it would grow. Near the end of 2023 the game was updated with the Unreal Engine 5. I decided it was time to give the game a chance. Since the newest patch, baddies behave oddly. All of them are static but now some shoot. I've also encountered one underground that was half stuck into the ground. The game consists of a simple quest mechanic - Find 5 outposts, go inside them and you will automatically get a code to open a safe box once you unlock the safe. The other task is to find the 5 keys to unlock the safes. The locations of the keys are DIFFICULT and appear to change with every new game! There are very small boxes placed all around the island and underground that contain these keys. You will find TONS of boxes but they are all empty. You will also find larger boxes but they only contain more ammo. You have 72 hours to find all keys, codes, grab the goods from the vault and then make it back to your boat to put them in your safe on the boat. In 10 years since this game has been up I could not find a single video that has even traveled nor done as much as I have so far in the game. Has anyone actually finished it? With all the bugs from the past my guess is no so I had to explore how far I could go with this game. The island is HUGE to cover all the terrain and then you have to add the several miles long tunnels and I mean SEVERAL. With so much terrain to cover, one miss of a single box and it could cost you the game and a lot of hours wasted. With the new update I have found all the outposts/codes and 4 of the 5 keys. I was playing for story and I never encountered any when you got to the island so far in playing. I would also point out that the game is still not optimized. On a 4090 4K wasn't smooth maxed out, 2K was a little better, 1080p maxed was the best performance on a 4090. Expect to tone down your graphic settings for smooth gameplay. They put a lot of work into the sheer size of the game but it isn't fully baked yet and these bugs/performance issues really hurt the series if it ever is going to move forward in any way. I had a lot of high hopes for the Cypress Inheritance series. Now I'm more hopefull than I was!

I've played quite a few broken games before, but this is pretty high on that list. There are so many problems in just the first half-hour of this game, that I doubt I will even try to brute-force my way through the sludge. First, they seem to have ignored optimization completely. Frequent and long loading screens, poor frame-rate, choppy camera control. Secondly, there is really no stealth. Enemies can spot you regardless of your position, visibility or speed of movement; most of the time, seemingly at random. Other times they will completely ignore you. The stealth utilities they give you are difficult to use when harried and when the frames are dropping (you know, the moment you need them). I found that the medkits were totally useless as well. Most of the time you can only take a single hit, and when you got lucky, two. There was never a point where I could stop and heal that graze. The fact that they are trying to work on a Chapter 2 before dealing with all this seems to be a marketing ploy. The developers need to stop what they are doing and work on the game engine + A.I. before they waste their efforts on this shell of a game. I sincerely hope they do; I still think the premise is good. Will be hopeful for any large patches to come.