I'm a big fan of iron-man style, but we all know there are crap ways to die and losing 20 hours of progress is just too big a consequence. Still, it would be nice if there were some consequence, rather than just going back to the last time you hit F5. Something to make you really fear death and do everything you can to avoid it.

- Make it so there are only two types of saves. Autosaves and Bookmarks.

- Bookmarks can only be made when you exit the game. When you resume play from a bookmark, it is deleted and cannot be used ever again.

- Whenever an autosave happens (which generally won't be often), it deletes all previous autosaves.

- Whenever you lose a game of dice poker, or suffer a similar non-death negative consequence, the game immediately autosaves.

So you end up with a mechanism that forces you to accept the negative consequences of your actions, and death really hurts even though you don't have to start your entire game over when you die (legitimately or due to coffee-spill-intervention).

Even though I said this is how Insane mode should work, it really shouldn't be linked to difficulty. You should be able to use this mechanism for any difficulty level.

Interesting thought. Such a mechanism would work similar to "Hardcore' mode in FO: New Vegas. Even though that was NOT really hardcore... still it was available regardless of difficulty settings.

To be fair what you are suggesting would be relatively easy to follow without the game specifically enforcing it. If you want to play that way just backup all your current saves, delete the save folder and go for it.

I think the different kind of saves are marked in the load menu (Auto, quick, etc) you can probably delete any not auto-save after loading it to prevent the continue mechanism from using it.

So overall it should be relatively easy to do as a self-imposed conduct.

Similarly, the current implementation of Insane mode can be self-implemented (if you die, stop playing).

Console standard save system. Is not really insane.

I tried to think of alternatives but it is hard to escape the scheme Diablo 2 / Demon's Souls, every time you die you lose something and have to go get. Dies during the process and it's gone forever. Maybe if the game gave you a limited number of saves per chapter. Like Hitman 2, you have 7 saves per chapter.

It is called "insane" for a reason.
And we know it is doable, as others have done it in its current form.

What you guys are really doing, is basically balking at the insane mode, and would like to see a "not-so-insane" highest difficulty setting, just so you have a better chance to finish the game and be able to say you finished the game "on the highest difficulty".