Good free Steam games that actually run on a Mac?

set the store filter to macOS plus free to play before anything else, saves a lot of disappointment. dota 2 still has a native mac version and it's fine on apple silicon. the trap is older games: plenty of them say mac supported but are 32-bit, and nothing 32-bit launches on a modern macOS no matter what the store page says. check when the game was last updated before you bother downloading.