It's an easy hidden object game where you find multiples of the same animals in brightly lit scenes; anyone can play it because the animals aren't really "hidden". Each scene is split into 2 areas which you use the scroll arrows to move between. The trivia questions you get in between scenes are often pretty challenging, and I found myself enjoying the trivia portion of the game much more than the "main" gameplay. You are also tasked to find 5 bonus cameras and 5 bonus pawprints in each HOS. Because only 1 of each bonus item ever appears in a scene and there are just 15 scenes total, this means completionists have to play every scene at least 5 times, making for a *very* repetitive game. It doesn't help that the animals are always in the same places every time, and the list you get doesn't change that much either. Once the maximum number of bonus items for the scene are located, no more of them will appear in that scene. Finding the bonus items gradually unlocks the animal pictures in a side image which is otherwise not part of the main game.
Other than the tricky trivia questions, there's really no challenge to be had because even on the hardest difficulty (where you have a timer of three minutes) you are not penalized for running out of time - the timer just stops but you can keep on playing and the only difference you see is you get a "good" instead of "excellent" in the end level dialog. There is a misclick penalty for excessive random clicking in a scene, but I never triggered it despite being nowhere near an expert at HOGs. You win gold for playing the HOS, but there's no use for it except to buy your way out of picking the wrong answer in a trivia question so your trivia stat doesn't get dinged, which seems like "cheating" to me. There's a multiplier which activates for finding the animals fast enough which I'm guessing increases the amount of gold you get, but I couldn't ever get it past 2x because the meter drops crazy fast. No Steam achievements.
I somehow triggered a glitch in the 12th scene where the last pawprint would not ever appear no matter how many times I replayed the scene, so can't complete the side image. The trivia questions began to repeat for me late in the game, and in one instance, one question which had repeated was glitched out in the repeat where one of the wrong answers wasn't present and even though I'd picked the correct choice, the game still called me "wrong" on it because of the messed up formatting. The game texts also didn't seem all that well edited as I noticed several typos and grammatical mistakes. It's OK if you simply want a mindless sort of game to play on a coffee break, but I've played better HOGs.
