An old game of mine had a very small map, and a total 30 minutes of playtime. I made it save automatically on closing, so you could close the game, open it again, and be exactly* where you were. It made for a pretty smooth experience, IMO.
I don’t know about your game, but mine was mostly exploratory. If there are stakes, some threats about, and you want to put pressure on the player, then having fixed save points makes sense. Kind of hard to answer anything specific without knowing what your game is like.