The version you download here does not run, is there a way to fix this or does the game have to be played through steam to work on Mac?

What exactly is it doing? And what version of Mac OS are you using?

OS 10.14.3 the game downloads as it should and installs as it should (I presume). Then I have to double click and press open to open the program, so that's not the issue, but when I do this the game runs for about 1/2 a second and then closes without any popups or error messages.

Ok, go to the toribash directory in Applications or wherever it was then right click on the TB executable and click show package contents or something similar to that. Then try to find a terminal executable labeled Toribash and run it. I had to do it on my Mac running OSX Sierra, and it seemed to work fine.