While playing one of the endless Backrooms games over the last weekend, I had the in-game handheld camera focused on one of the monstrous entities, and wondered out loud to my friend, "what if we were watching this on, like, a '90s VHS tape or something?" The idea held weight, so I went through the interwebs to find an app that would let me do just that.

That's when I found Shaderglass. It's a newly released app that just went from GitHub to Steam, and is completely free-to-use with over 1200 visual shaders and filters to put on your screen. ShaderGlass acts as a transparent window you can put on your display and play or watch anything with the shader of your choice.

Between the nostalgia-inducing CRT monitor filters and NES-pixelized filters, I've been having a ball of a time finding the right shader for each game, and have a new reason to reinstall all my old favorites for a fresh visual journey.

ShaderGlass applies 1200+ shaders or filters on your display

More than 1200 reasons to replay all your games

In ShaderGlass, you get a full-screen overlay that covers your entire screen, with over 1200 shaders you can pick from. Between community favorites, handheld console filters, CRT shaders, and hundreds of others, you'd be spoiled for choice when it comes to picking the right shader for your game.

ShaderGlass can also control the frame rate of the display, going from 100% to 20% as per user choice. On the emulation front, the tool also gives you aspect ratio choices according to whichever old device you might be emulating — NES, SNES, PAL, DOS, or NTSC. Additionally, you can also scale your display if you want to.

Inarguably the best use of ShaderGlass's capabilities, however, is in gaming, as I have found. Whether it was horror games that I reinstalled as soon as my bandwidth would allow, or even AAA titles I didn't think I'd visit again, ShaderGlass really has given me plenty of reasons to replay old games.

Retro game emulation is more fun than ever with ShaderGlass

The old games, but on the old screens

For emulating all my retro games, either through RetroArch or through dedicated emulators, ShaderGlass has been an absolute boon. I started off with NES and SNES titles, pairing them with chunky CRT scanlines, and I didn't even expect the subtle color blood from the edges, but it was there. That alone made my experience so much more enjoyable, and I genuinely had to put in effort to close the app and go back to work.

Suddenly, A Link to the Past took on a whole new meaning, and I was genuinely transported back into my childhood living room. Moving into N64 games like GoldenEye 007 and Super Mario 64, I chose soft glow shaders with NTSC distortions, and boy did that feel right.

Even Chains of Olympus on PPSSPP benefited from ShaderGlass, with handheld LCD filters spoiling me for choice when it came to the visual flair. I haven't felt this authentic an emulation experience ever, and that's the biggest compliment I can lend to this app.

Horror games are essential experiences with ShaderGlass

Trust me on this one — replay your favorite horror game with ShaderGlass on

This is where ShaderGlass immediately cemented itself as game-changing for me. Backrooms: Escape Together, or the fantastic Silent Hill 2 remake? They took on completely new lives of their own with just a couple of shaders — technicolor and '80s VHS. Take a look at the screenshots for yourself and tell me if they even look like the same experience.

Sure, it took a while to really pick out the right one, but for most horror games, I would immediately recommend the '80s VHS filter, because that's where the most fun is. Suddenly, I felt like I was watching found footage of someone who went through the horrific ordeals in the Backrooms or was walking through Silent Hill.

AAA titles with ShaderGlass gives them new life

Night City like your dad visited it

I really wasn't ready for just how amazing Night City in Cyberpunk 2077 looked with ShaderGlass. The vibe I managed to create in the daylight was 'old videos on your dad's HandyCam'. Once the sun went down? Neon-plunged CRT for Night City's nightlife is the perfect choice.

I've played the game twice, I've finished Phantom Liberty, and as much fun as it is to roam around Night City, doing it with ShaderGlass just enhanced that experience tenfold. I even tried ShaderGlass with Elden Ring, revisiting The Lands Between after years, but I haven't quite found the right shader yet. I'm hoping when readers install ShaderGlass to try it out, they come up with new combinations for games and shaders, so fingers crossed.

What do you need to run ShaderGlass?

Windows 11 and a beefy GPU, for starters

Fair warning — Windows 10 users might not get as much out of ShaderGlass, since the app never worked exactly right on my Win10 PC. No matter what application I tried running with it, I couldn't get rid of big yellow borders around it, constantly reminding me that I was, in fact, not playing on a real CRT screen. Additionally, frame rates kept dropping with the games I played, especially in Cyberpunk.

Switching to my Windows 11 desktop, however, fixed pretty much everything. I still had to tweak a few graphics settings here and there, like disabling ray-tracing, since it wouldn't matter anyway with the filters on, but every application ran incredibly smoothly with Windows 11.

A fairly decent GPU should also help run things along smoothly, since CPU and GPU usage both spike up by around 20% and 15% respectively when running ShaderGlass.

A free tool that will change every game you play

ShaderGlass feels like it has genuinely rewired the way I look at my game library. It may come off as a quirky tool to some, but once you fight the right combination of shader and game, there's genuinely no going back. Sure, it isn't like I'm going to be using this tool on every new game that comes along, but right now, in a long list of games I had no plans to revisit, I've already found a reason to reinstall and replay plenty of them.