In Hollow Knight: Silksong, quite a few changes were made from the original game's core mechanics, which includes the rework of charms into tools that you equip onto crests, making the entire thing much more concise.
The thing is, Hollow Knight made it pretty easy to figure out how you equip more charms. You just grabbed charm notches, and you could have as many charms as you were allowed, or a little more if you were willing to take double damage.
In Silksong, though, the crests can be upgraded to allow for more tools to be equipped, but it's not as simple as just grabbing a charm notch and calling it a day. It takes quite a bit more pre-planning, and making a decision isn't easy.
I'll walk you through how to upgrade your crests, which lets you equip more tools, and I'll also cover exactly how these crests work, as I ended up burning one of my precious materials on a crest I didn't jibe with.
Unlocking Crest Slots
To unlock a crest slot, first, you'll need a Memory Locket. These are about as common as Charm Notches were, sometimes appearing in shops, but primarily being found scattered about the world in obscure, hard to reach locations.
Once you get your hands on one, though, getting a new slot unlocked is somewhat simple. Just sit at a bench, inspect one of the small dots near the big circles on your crests, and you should be able to unlock it.
Be careful, though. As you progress through the game, you unlock more crests that give you very different combat styles, and you may prefer one over your default, so you should be patient with using these.
You can use it on any of the three categories of tools, but keep in mind which color corresponds to which type of tool. If it glows red before unlocking, it's a weapon, if it glows blue, it's defense, and if it glows yellow, it's for exploration.
Changing Crests
Once you've progressed further through the game, you'll unlock crests through some big cutscenes where Hornet absorbs the style. Whenever you unlock it, you will automatically switch to that crest, and be without any tools until you navigate to another bench.
Once you get back to a bench, you can press the button displayed in the bottom left of the crests menu to swap between your crests. You're able to equip the same tool to multiple crests, but your unlocked slots do not carry over.
This means you should likely hoard your Memory Lockets until you're sure you want to run with that crest for a while. I accidentally put an upgrade on the Reaper crest, and I had to pay the price, unable to get that token back.
Once you get enough tokens that you're completely sure you'd be fine with upgrading your current favorite crest, feel free to go for it, and grab whichever genre of tool you prefer.
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 91/100 Critics Rec: 97%
- Released
- September 4, 2025
- ESRB
- Everyone 10+ / Fantasy Violence, Mild Blood
- Developer(s)
- Team Cherry
- Publisher(s)
- Team Cherry
- Engine
- Unity
- Genre(s)
- Metroidvania, Action, Adventure, Soulslike
