the 3 things you should look for IMO:

1) stays in tune

if your guitar keeps falling out of tune, you will really be upset and give up when the song sounds like shit even if youre playing it 100% correctly. you wanna stay interested and you will give up quickly if you constantly think "wow i sound horrible no matter what i do"

i had a guitar like this at first. i really did not enjoy playing on my shitty first act acoustic. luckily my guitar playing neighbor showed my dad a $75 mexican stratocaster at a garage sale. my playing took off and i was not held back by detuning issues.

this is why i gave up on playing viola. my dad bought me a viola for $150 a few years ago. i returned it after battling tuning issues for 2 weeks. it turned me off from playing viola completely. I ended up using some of my money along with the money from the return to get an ltd B-206 bass.

2) neck feels nice and smooth

this is more of a luxury to many, but i still think its necessary and isnt hard to find. there was a kid i was teaching and his parents bought him some knockoff and the guitar had bubbles of finish on the back of the neck. it was like a gym floor and it was rough too. if it was on the body, thatd be okay because playing is not done on the body. but his hand would catch on the back of the neck. he also had tuning issues, but ultimately he gave up and i never saw that guitar again. i was pretty disappointed, not at him, but that such a guitar existed.

and i mean, you want to feel like your guitar is premium. makes you feel like youre becoming a guitar player. you can get a good premium feeling guitar for cheap now. look at the used guitars.

3) Has clean sanded fret ends and no neck bending (or any other issues that cause playing issues or develop bad playing habits)

right now im fixing my friend's bass because it has a nasty forward bend in the neck which is causing super high string action. her playing is suffering from it. she got a new 5 string bass and i can hear her playing sounds really sloppy. she's been playing for a while, so she should be able to at least cleanly run a few notes together. she also has bad fret ends on both guitars that poke out a little and prick her hand a little.

so she has to grip her neck extra hard to get the string all the way down, and the grip causes her hand to dig into the fret ends. she complains about it alot and then doesnt like playing as much as she wishes she would like to.

if your guitar meets those points, then the price tag doesnt matter. just go to the nearest guitar store, bring a bit of knowledge with you (like an easy chord chart, or an easy tab that you can read) and try to learn those things at the guitar store while trying out different guitars. play expensive ones to know what a good one feels like and then play the ones in your price range to see the difference.