Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

A lot of people seem to be misunderstanding OP's question and just suggesting places that offer free games.

OP is asking if there's any not shady way to get a game that's offered for free on Steam without DRM other than using the Steam client.

If the game is only available through Steam then unfortunately the answer is no. Depending on the nature of your objection to the Steam client there are some possible courses of action other than going somewhere sketchy though.

You could install it, download the game, copy it from the Steam install location, then uninstall Steam.

Alternatively keep a sandboxed Steam client installed in a VM to download the game which you extract from the VM.

Another option might be to just ask someone you know that does use Steam to download the game and send it to you.

Legit sites:

https://www.friv.com/

https://www.newgrounds.com/games

https://itch.io/games/free

Also check out the gaming section of fmhy if you change your mind and do want to pirate

https://fmhy.net/gaming

So wait, I might not be understanding what you're asking correctly, but if you want to download free games without DRM, that you don't intent to pirate...

Are you just looking for itch.io?

Gog is the obvious choice but there isn't really a lot of free games on it

Basically, you're just looking for PC game stores that carry free games other than Steam, right? In that case, Itch.io is the main place to look. Beyond that, games will primarily be distributed on their developer or publisher's website. Piracy probably won't be an easy option, as people aren't going to put in the work creating/uploading pirate copies of a game thats easily available otherwise.

Edit: Also, I think you may be able to use SteamCMD (Steam's non-launcher, CLI tool) to download the game if its DRM free.

Something like this in SteamCMD:

Are you looking for a launcher for these separate games? If so, Playnite might be what you're looking for. I don't think it'll handle updates though. Also, GoG is a great source of DRM-free games, so maybe check that for what you're after since GoG Galaxy works similarly and has been less shit lately.

Yeah unless they've been published on another site, that would be pirating them.

Gog or itch.io

Is it a moral obligation or something because if not and you are comfortable with cli you can use steamcmd