you can still have checkpoints that the game rolls you back to on a death, I'm not conflating "how you save the game" and "how you recover from a death" necessarily
But yeah, the only examples I can immediately think of that breaks those two schema and do so without feeling bass-ackwards and janky are ones that basically use the mechanic of saving in a strange, metafictional way (Undertale, to a degree Nier Automata)
i think this is an easy variant of scheme 1 but I also sometimes want like the ability to play two diverging paths and have saves in both of them at the same time without overwriting the other in any way
time continues linearly and at the end of 72 hours you have to reset time
the ability to play two diverging paths and have saves in both of them at the same time without overwriting the other in any way