For the snoop animations this is a normal behaviour. They are always on top of everything...
Propbably you could imitate these by making for every relevant object an animation and have a scene "called by other" action which shows all the hotspots animations and one which hides them. Lets call it "show_hotspot" and "hide_hotspot".
Then on the hotspot key you could use an execute script action part and use:
startAction(game.CurrentScene.SceneActions["show_hotspot"])
and when releasing the hotspot key call
stopAction(game.CurrentScene.SceneActions["show_hotspot"]) +
startAction(game.CurrentScene.SceneActions["hide_hotspot"])